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Falsely remembering information can have negative consequences for day-to-day functioning and can be especially problematic for older adults who often experience higher rates of false memory. Because there is considerable variability between older adults in memory and cognition, it is essential that we understand the factors that place older individuals at risk for developing false memories. Whereas lower frontal functioning has previously been related to false memory in general, prior research suggests that there may also be domain-specificity in the factors associated with false memory. To test this possibility, 211 young adults and 152 older adults completed tasks measuring semantic false memory, perceptual false memory, frontal functioning, semantic discrimination, and perceptual discrimination. Factor analyses revealed that – contrary to predictions – individual differences in semantic and perceptual false memory were best represented by a single, overarching false memory factor. Although cognitive abilities were generally not related to false memory when assessed together, semantic discrimination, perceptual discrimination, and frontal functioning were all negatively associated with false memory in isolation, and jointly predicted 37% of the variance in younger adults and 40% in older adults. Importantly, the extent to which these cognitive abilities protected against false memory did not differ between older and younger adults. Results suggest that for both older and younger adults, individual differences in the tendency to falsely remember information are captured by a single overarching construct that has negative (yet redundant) associations with various cognitive abilities.
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The Relationship Between Subjective Memory Experience and Objective Memory Performance Remains Stable Across the Lifespan
The way humans remember events changes across the lifespan. Older adults often rate the vividness of their memories as being greater or equal to younger adults, despite poorer performance on episodic memory tasks. This study explored how the content (place, person and object) and specificity (conceptual gist versus perceptual detail) of event memories relate to the subjective experience of memory vividness and memory confidence, and how this relationship is affected by healthy ageing. 100 healthy older adults and 100 young adults were tested online, using an adapted version of a paradigm developed by Cooper and Ritchey (2022). At encoding, participants generated a distinctive story to associate together (1) a theme word, and images of (2) a famous person, (3) a place, and (4) an object, to create unique events. At test, participants identified the event components using word labels (indexing conceptual gist), and the studied images (indexing perceptual details). Replicating Cooper and Ritchey (2022), we found that young adults’ memory vividness ratings were related to their memory for the conceptual gist of the events, with no modulation by the type of the content recalled. Strikingly, older adults showed the same relationship between vividness measures and objective performance as the young adults. Contrary to some previous studies, we found that older adults obtained lower scores for gist-based memory, and their vividness ratings were correspondingly lower than the younger adults. Across both age groups, vividness and confidence ratings followed a similar pattern, showing a stronger relationship with conceptual gist. Our results suggest that throughout the lifespan, the amount of conceptual information retrieved about an event relates to the ability to reexperience it vividly, and to have confidence in one’s memory.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2047415
- PAR ID:
- 10545602
- Editor(s):
- Mathôt, Sebastiaan
- Publisher / Repository:
- Collabra: Psychology
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Collabra: Psychology
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2474-7394
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.116195
