Saturday 10th of May, 10.15-11.45
Aula Volta
Chair of the session – Anne-Lise Florkin
| 10.15-10.35 | Katja Haeuser | Totally off: Older adults misjudge the veracity of their memory contents. |
| 10.35-10.55 | Nathaniel R. Greene | A theory of age-related changes in memory specificity. |
| 10.55-11.15 | Nicola Ballhausen | Age-related differences in objective, subjective, and everyday-life memory: divergent patterns in prospective memory lapses through experience sampling. |
| 11.15-11.35 | Gerard Campbell | The impact of age and spontaneous strategy use on real-world visual memory tasks. |
Abstracts
Totally off: Older adults misjudge the veracity of their memory contents.
by Katja Haeuser | Jutta Kray
Saarland University
Aging is known to bring along declining memory accuracy generally, and an increase in gistbased false remembering specifically. However, most previous studies used lists of isolated, semantically related words to investigate false memory. This may over-estimate age differences, since constrained lists of single words likely exacerbate gist. We investigated false remembering by means of sentences which constrained expectations towards a particular word but ended in a different lexical item. During encoding, younger and older adults read sentences word by word. During retrieval, their recognition memory was probed for previously seen old words, and previously predictable but not actually presented “lures”.
New words were also presented. Participants responded on a four-point scale (sure old, maybe old, maybe new, sure new). Results showed an age-related increase in false recognition of lures, even when corrected for response bias. Whereas younger adults allocated comparable rates of false memory judgments to “maybe old” and “sure old” responses, older adults issued nearly three times as many false memory judgments to “sure old” responses. In sum, even when materials are less artificially constrained, aging results in an increase in false remembering. Older adults have difficulty at successfully calibrating their recognition judgments to their declining memory accuracy.
A theory of age-related changes in memory specificity
by Nathaniel R. Greene | Michael J. Kahana
University of Pennsylvania
As we age, our episodic memories become less precise. The mechanisms underpinning these age-related shifts toward more general and away from more specific episodic memories remain to be fully elucidated. We propose a computational modelling approach, rooted in retrieved context theory (RCT), to identify these underlying mechanisms. RCT proposes that encoding involves binding items to a time-varying representation of context, and retrieval proceeds by re-activating prior contexts to remember associated items. We show that factors that differentially influence context evolution among young and older adults can explain why older adults’ episodic memories are typically less specific in nature. These factors include age differences in the tendency to rely on pre-existing semantic relationships and in the sensitivity to integrating unstudied but semantically similar items into the encoding or retrieval context. Our goal is to demonstrate that age-related differences in memory specificity can be accounted for in an RCT framework with minimal assumptions about the source of these differences, paving the way for a parsimonious theory of age-related memory changes.
Age-related differences in objective, subjective, and everyday-life memory: divergent patterns in prospective and retrospective memory lapses through experience sampling.
by Nicola Ballhausen | Yvonne Brehmer
Developmental Psychology, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Prospective memory (PM) refers to remembering future intentions, while retrospective memory (RM) reflects remembering past information.
Younger adults typically outperform older adults on objective laboratory PM and RM tests. Yet, older adults excel in everyday PM (i.e., age-PM paradox). However, findings on subjective memory are mixed: Older adults report more lapses in questionnaires, but daily diary results vary. This complexity highlights divergent memory patterns across age, assessment, and memory type.
The present study extended findings from daily diary studies by assessing memory lapses seven times per day over six days using experience sampling methods (ESM). Lapses were coded into PM and RM. Testing 160 younger and older adults, the study explored age differences in reported memory lapses for PM and RM, separately, and analyzed how ESM data related to objective memory performance and subjective memory questionnaires.
Preliminary analyses suggested more PM than RM lapses in both age groups. While older adults reported more RM lapses than younger adults, the opposite was the case for PM. Objective laboratory measures correlated with ESM data in older but not younger adults. Moreover, subjective measures correlated with ESM in both age groups.
Implications of the findings will be discussed, both methodologically and conceptually.
The impact of age and spontaneous strategy use on real-world visual memory tasks.
by Gerard Campbell1 | Rebecca Hart1 | Richard J. Allen2 | Claudia von Bastian3 | Melanie R. Burke2 | Mario Parra Rodriguez1 | Louise A. Brown Nicholls1
1 University of Strathclyde
2 University of Leeds
3 University of Sheffield
The strategies people use during working memory tasks can impact performance and vary with adult ageing. However, more research is needed to understand how individuals spontaneously use different strategies to remember information, and how this changes with age, particularly using more ‘real-world’ tasks. In this pre-registered study, 50 younger (18-35 yrs) and 50 older (65-85) adults performed a novel visual binding task in which they briefly viewed everyday objects within realistic, virtual scenes. Participants were asked to recall the object-colour (Study 1) or object-location (Study 2) bindings. Throughout the task, spontaneous strategy use was reported via both verbal reports and Likert-scale responses probing specific task-relevant strategies. Participants were subsequently given a ‘surprise’ long-term memory task testing incidental memory for the information presented in the earlier task. Across both studies, we report participants’ strategies and any effects of age group. We then assess the impact of age group and strategy use on memory performance, as well as the potential interaction between the two. Overall, the study provides new insights into which strategies are most effective for supporting memory performance in young and older age.