Characterizing the subjective experience of episodic past,future, and counterfactual thinking in healthy younger and older adults

Recent evidence demonstrates remarkable overlap in the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying episodic memory, episodic future thinking, and episodic counterfactual thinking. However, the extent to which the phenomenological characteristics associated with these mental simulations change as a result of ageing remains largely unexplored. The current study employs adapted versions of the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire and the Autobiographical Interview to compare the phenomenological characteristics associated with both positive and negative episodic past, future, and counterfactual simulations in younger and older adults. Additionally, it explores the influence of perceived likelihood in the experience of such simulations. The results indicate that, across all simulations, older adults generate more external details and report higher ratings of vividness, composition, and intensity than young adults. Conversely, younger adults generate more internal details across all conditions and rated positive and negative likely future events as more likely than did older adults. Additionally, both younger and older adults reported higher ratings for sensory, composition, and intensity factors during episodic memories relative to future and counterfactual thoughts. Finally, for both groups, ratings of spatial coherence and composition were higher for likely counterfactuals than for both unlikely counterfactuals and future simulations. Implications for the psychology of mental simulation and ageing are discussed.     

Priming voluntary autobiographical memories: Implications for the organisation of autobiographical memory and voluntary recall processes

The goal of this study was to show that voluntary autobiographical memories could be primed by the prior activation of autobiographical memories. Three experiments demonstrated voluntary memory priming with three different approaches. In Experiment 1 primed participants were asked to recall memories from their elementary school years. In a subsequent memory task primed participants were asked to recall memories from any time period, and they produced significantly more memories from their elementary school years than unprimed participants. In Experiment 2 primed participants were asked to recall what they were doing when they had heard various news events occurring between 1998 and 2005. Subsequently these participants produced significantly more memories from this time period than unprimed participants. In Experiment 3 primed participants were asked to recall memories from their teenage years. Subsequently these participants were able to recall more memories from ages 13–15 than unprimed participants, where both had only 1 second to produce a memory. We argue that the results support the notion that episodic memories can activate one another and that some of them are organised according to lifetime periods. We further argue that the results have implications for the reminiscence bump and voluntary recall of the past.     

The computerized scoring algorithm for the autobiographical memory test: updates and extensions for analyzing memories of English-speaking adults

ABSTRACT

The Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT) has been central in psychopathological studies of memory dysfunctions, as reduced memory specificity or overgeneralised autobiographical memory has been recognised as a hallmark vulnerability for depression. In the AMT, participants are asked to generate specific memories in response to emotional cue words, and their responses are scored by human experts. Because the manual coding takes some time, particularly when analysing a large dataset, recent studies have proposed computerised scoring algorithms. These algorithms have been shown to reliably discriminate between specific and non-specific memories of English-speaking children and Dutch- and Japanese-speaking adults. The key limitation is that the algorithm is not developed for English-speaking adult memories, which may cover a wider range of vocabulary that the existing algorithm for English-speaking child memories cannot process correctly. In the present study, we trained a new support vector machine to score memories of English-speaking adults. In a performance test (predicting memory specificity against human expert coding), the adult-memory algorithm outperformed the child-memory variant. In another independent performance test, the adult-memory algorithm showed robust performances to score memories that were generated in response to a different set of cues. These results suggest that the adult-memory algorithm reliably scores memory specificity.     

Priming autobiographical memories: How recalling the past may affect everyday forms of autobiographical remembering

This study investigated the idea that when one recalls past episodes, that the content of those memories will activate additional episodic memories with like content, and such memories will then have the potential of surfacing in subsequent acts of involuntary and voluntary recall. We tested the episodic content priming hypothesis in two experiments. In Experiment 1, priming group participants first recalled memories about specific activities or events and then they were subsequently engaged in a word-cue voluntary autobiographical memory task. The results showed that priming group participants produced more episodic memories involving the primed content on this task than control participants occupied in the same task. In Experiment 2, episodic content priming was further tested on a measure of involuntary autobiographical memory (i.e., the vigilance task). The results on this task also revealed support for the episodic content priming hypothesis, including after a delay of 24 h.     

Comparing music- and food-evoked autobiographical memories in young and older adults: A diary study

Previous research has found that music brings back more vivid and emotional autobiographical memories than various other retrieval cues. However, such studies have often been low in ecological validity and constrained by relatively limited cue selection and predominantly young adult samples. Here, we compared music to food as cues for autobiographical memories in everyday life in young and older adults. In two separate four-day periods, 39 younger (ages 18–34) and 39 older (ages 60–77) adults recorded their music- and food-evoked autobiographical memories in paper diaries. Across both age groups, music triggered more frequent autobiographical memories, a greater proportion of involuntary memories, and memories rated as more personally important in comparison to food cues. Age differences impacted music- and food-evoked memories similarly, with older adults consistently recalling older and less specific memories, which they rated as more positive, vivid, and rehearsed. However, young and older adults did not differ in the number or involuntary nature of their recorded memories. This work represents an important step in understanding the phenomenology of naturally occurring music-evoked autobiographical memories across adulthood and provides new insights into how and why music may be a more effective trigger for personally valued memories than certain other everyday cues.     

Exploring the experience of episodic past,future, and counterfactual thinking in younger and older adults: A study of a Colombian sample

Although extant evidence suggests that many neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying episodic past, future, and counterfactual thinking overlap, recent results have uncovered differences among these three processes. However, the extent to which there may be age-related differences in the phenomenological characteristics associated with episodic past, future and counterfactual thinking remains unclear. This study used adapted versions of the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire and the Autobiographical Interview in younger and older adults to investigate the subjective experience of episodic past, future and counterfactual thinking. The results suggest that, across all conditions, younger adults generated more internal details than older adults. However, older adults generated more external details for episodic future and counterfactual thinking than younger adults. Additionally, younger and older adults generated more internal details, and gave higher sensory and contextual ratings, for memories rather than future and counterfactual thoughts. Methodological and theoretical consequences for extant theories of mental simulation are discussed.     

New insights into the formation and duration of flashbulb memories: Evidence from medical diagnosis memories

Flashbulb memories are vivid and salient memories for the moment one hears about a surprising, emotional, and significant event. The current research examined flashbulb memories for a loved one's medical diagnosis, focusing on individual and situational factors associated with memory development and endurance over time. An online survey collected memory narratives and subjective ratings from 309 mothers who received a diagnosis of Down syndrome for their child. Time since diagnosis ranged from 1 month to 52 years. Using two independent measures, the Flashbulb Memory Checklist and the Autobiographical Memory Questionnaire, we found that a majority of diagnosis memories qualified as flashbulb memories, even 20 years or more after the event. Importantly, support from the medical staff at diagnosis emerged as a critical variable related to flashbulb memory development and the persistence of these flashbulb memories over time.     

The psychological distance of memories: Examining causal relations with mood and self-esteem in young,middle-aged and older adults

Three studies examined the self-enhancement function of autobiographical memory (measured with subjective temporal distance of memories). Participants recalled a memory of an attained and a failed goal and rated the subjective distance between each memory and the present. Study 1 showed that young adults with higher self-esteem felt closer to memories of attained goals and farther from failure memories than those with lower self-esteem. In Study 2, young, middle-aged and older adults with higher self-esteem felt closer to success memories, whereas self-esteem was unrelated to the temporal distance of failure memories. In both studies, feeling closer to success memories (and far from failure) led to enhanced mood. In Study 3, state self-esteem was experimentally manipulated. The manipulation had no effect on young and older adults, but middle-aged adults whose self-esteem was decreased, felt closer to success memories than failure memories. Results are discussed in relation to the temporal self-appraisal theory.     

The coherence of memories for trauma: Evidence from posttraumatic stress disorder

Participants with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and participants with a trauma but without PTSD wrote narratives of their trauma and, for comparison, of the most-important and the happiest events that occurred within a year of their trauma. They then rated these three events on coherence. Based on participants’ self-ratings and on naïve-observer scorings of the participants’ narratives, memories of traumas were not more incoherent than the comparison memories in participants in general or in participants with PTSD. This study comprehensively assesses narrative coherence using a full two (PTSD or not) by two (traumatic event or not) design. The results are counter to most prevalent theoretical views of memory for trauma.     

Correlates and phenomenology of first and third person memories

Worry as a trait is an individual's general tendency to become worried, which in severe cases is associated with the diagnosis Generalised Anxiety Disorder. Mental time travel (MTT) is the ability to mentally project oneself into one's personal past or future, in terms of memories of personal past events or projections of possible events in the personal future. MTT can be voluntarily initiated or occur involuntarily. The current exploratory study investigated involuntary and voluntary MTT in the context of trait worry, thereby bringing together research on worry and MTT. High (N=20) and low (N=16) worriers recorded involuntary and voluntary autobiographical memories and future projections using a structured diary method. We predicted that MTT in high worriers would show signs of cognitive avoidance, such as reduced emotional intensity, more observer perspective, less visual imagery, or coming up with overgeneral or less self-relevant events. We found only partial support for our hypotheses in that high worriers rated personal memories and future projections lower on measures of self-relevance than did low worriers.     

Nonbelieved memories in middle-aged and older people

Previous studies have reported that young participants typically date events that they remember, but no longer believe they experienced, to the period of childhood. The present study investigated whether participants aged between 40 and 79 years dated events related to relinquished memories to the period of childhood, as do younger people, or whether they dated such events to a period later in life. The study also compared believed and nonbelieved memories with respect to memory perspective (1st vs 3rd person perspective). Results indicated that the majority of middle-aged and older people dated nonbelieved memories to the period of childhood (median age = 8 years). No correlation was found between the participants’ current age and their age at the time the nonbelieved event occurred. In addition, results showed that believed memories were more likely to be retrieved from a 1st person perspective than were nonbelieved memories.     

Priming involuntary autobiographical memories in the lab

Involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs) are recollections of personal past that frequently and spontaneously occur in daily life. Initial studies by Mace (2005) showed that deliberately reminiscing about a certain lifetime period (e.g., high school) significantly increased the number of different IAMs from the same period in subsequent days, suggesting that priming may play a significant role in the retrieval of IAMs in everyday life. In the present study, we used a modified experimental paradigm, originally used by Schlagman and Kvavilashvili (2008), to study IAMs under well-controlled laboratory conditions. Participants completed a monotonous vigilance task twice and reported the occurrence of any spontaneous thoughts that were later classed as IAMs or other thoughts. Priming was manipulated by having experimental participants reminiscing about high school period between the two vigilance tasks and control participants playing simple games. Results showed that participants in the experimental group reported IAMs relating to high school period more frequently during the second vigilance task than those in the control group. In the experimental group, the number of high school memories was marginally higher in the second vigilance task compared to the first vigilance task with the medium effect size, but this within subjects effect was not significant in the control group. Finally, priming also enhanced the retrieval of more remote IAMs in the experimental group compared to the control group. These results suggest that priming may play a significant role in the activation and recall of IAMs and open up interesting avenues for future research.     

Continuity of phenomenology and (in)consistency of content of meaningful autobiographical memories

Phenomenology is a critical component of autobiographical memory retrieval; it reflects both (a) memory-specific features and (b) stable individual differences. Few studies have tested phenomenology longitudinally. The present work examined the continuity of memory phenomenology in a sample of Italians adults (N = 105) over a 4-week period. Participants retrieved two ‘key’ personal memories, a Turning Point and an Early Childhood Memory, rated the phenomenology of each memory, and completed measures of personality, psychological distress and subjective well-being. Phenomenological ratings were moderately stable over time (median correlation >.40), regardless of memory content. Personality traits, psychological distress and well-being were associated with phenomenology cross-sectionally and with changes in phenomenology over time. These results suggest that how individuals re-experience their most important personal memories is relatively consistent over time and shaped by both trait and state aspects of psychological functioning.     

Autobiographical memories of specific social events for older and younger adults: Context dependency of the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire on recollection of 1970 and 2005 Japan World Expositions1

To clarify the characteristics of autobiographical memories of personally experienced social events, we examined visitors' long‐term memories of the 1970 Japan World Exposition Osaka (Expo 1970) for 47 older adults and of Expo 2005 Aichi Japan (Expo 2005) for 42 older and 40 younger adults using the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire (MCQ). The factor structure of the MCQ was compared with that of a previous study on long‐term memories of the graduation ceremonies of junior high‐school students, which employed the MCQ and itself was used as a comparative data set (N = 1183). Thus, the long‐term memory characteristics of four independent groups were considered for comparative analysis: Expo 1970‐Older, Expo 2005‐Older, Expo 2005‐Younger, and Graduation‐Younger. The mean scores for each of eight MCQ factors were calculated in each of the four groups. Significant differences of scores between the four independent groups were found on several factors of the MCQ. Based on these data, some issues of the context dependency of MCQ including the influence of retention interval, participant age, and the nature of experience are discussed.     

The phenomenology and temporal distributions of autobiographical memories elicited with emotional and neutral cue words

In this study we examined whether the temporal distribution of autobiographical memory changes when different types of cue words are used to elicit the memories, and how the type of cue word affects the phenomenal characteristics of the memories. A total of 76 participants, ranging in age from 21 to 69 years, were presented with 22 cue words (emotional, emotion-provoking, and neutral). They were asked to recall a personal event and to complete the Autobiographical Memory Questionnaire (Rubin, Schrauf, & Greenberg, 2003, 2004) for each cue word. Results showed that the phenomenological properties of autobiographical memories which were cued with emotional and emotion-provoking words were rated higher than those of memories which were cued with neutral words, and that the peak in the temporal distributions of the autobiographical memories that were cued with emotional or emotion-provoking words were located later than the peak of the distribution of the memories that were cued with neutral words.     

A comparison of dimensional models of emotion: Evidence from emotions,prototypical events,autobiographical memories,and words

The intensity and valence of 30 emotion terms, 30 events typical of those emotions, and 30 autobiographical memories cued by those emotions were each rated by different groups of 40 undergraduates. A vector model gave a consistently better account of the data than a circumplex model, both overall and in the absence of high-intensity, neutral valence stimuli. The Positive Activation – Negative Activation (PANA) model could be tested at high levels of activation, where it is identical to the vector model. The results replicated when ratings of arousal were used instead of ratings of intensity for the events and autobiographical memories. A reanalysis of word norms gave further support for the vector and PANA models by demonstrating that neutral valence, high-arousal ratings resulted from the averaging of individual positive and negative valence ratings. Thus, compared to a circumplex model, vector and PANA models provided overall better fits.     

Individual differences in recognising involuntary autobiographical memories: Impact on the reporting of abstract cues

This study examined individual differences in the ability to recognise involuntary autobiographical memories. We hypothesised that individuals may not always recognise involuntary memories which are cued by abstract experiences (e.g., thoughts or language), while they are better able to recognise those which are cued by concrete sensory/perpetual experiences. We hypothesised that individuals without formal training in psychology would be more prone to these recognition failures than individuals with training in psychology. We tested the hypothesis by comparing the results of general first-year undergraduate students, graduate students in psychology and graduates students in other disciplines after each had participated in a two-week diary study of their naturally occurring involuntary memories. The results showed undergraduate participants and non-psychology graduate participants reporting fewer involuntary memories being triggered by abstract cues than the graduate psychology participants, while the groups did not differ in the report of memories triggered by sensory/perpetual cues. The implications of the findings are discussed.     

Overgeneral autobiographical memory as a predictor of the course of depression: A meta-analysis

Overgeneral autobiographical memory (OGM) is a robust phenomenon in depression, but the extent to which OGM predicts the course of depression is not well-established. This meta-analysis synthesized data from 15 studies to examine the degree to which OGM 1) correlates with depressive symptoms at follow-up, and 2) predicts depressive symptoms at follow-up over and above initial depressive symptoms. Although the effects are small, specific and categoric/overgeneral memories generated during the Autobiographical Memory Test significantly predicted the course of depression. Fewer specific memories and more categoric/overgeneral memories were associated with higher follow-up depressive symptoms, and predicted higher follow-up symptoms over and above initial symptoms. Potential moderators were also examined. The age and clinical depression status of participants, as well as the length of follow-up between the two depressive symptom assessments, significantly moderated the predictive relationship between OGM and the course of depression. The predictive relationship between specific memories and follow-up depressive symptoms became greater with increasing age and a shorter length of follow-up, and the predictive relationship was stronger for participants with clinical depression diagnoses than for nonclinical participants. These findings highlight OGM as a predictor of the course of depression, and future studies should investigate the mechanisms underlying this relationship.     

Age differences in autobiographical memory across the adult lifespan: older adults report stronger phenomenology

As an individual’s life story evolves across adulthood, the subjective experience (phenomenology) of autobiographical memory likely changes. In addition to age at retrieval, both the recency of the memory and the age when a memory is formed may be particularly important to its phenomenology. The present work examines the effect of three temporal factors on phenomenology ratings: (a) age of the participant, (b) age at the event reported in the memory, and (c) memory age (recency). A large sample of Americans (N?=?1120), stratified by chronological age, recalled and rated two meaningful memories, a Turning Point and an Early Childhood Memory. Ratings of phenomenology (e.g., vividness of turning points) were higher among older adults compared to younger adults. Memories of events from the reminiscence bump were more positive in valence than events from other time periods but did not differ on other phenomenological dimensions; recent memories had stronger phenomenology than remote memories. In contrast to phenomenology, narrative content was generally unrelated to participant age, age at the event, or memory age. Overall, the findings indicate age-related differences in how meaningful memories are re-experienced.