The impact of beliefs about face recognition ability on memory retrieval processes in young and older adults

This study examined whether beliefs about face recognition ability differentially influence memory retrieval in older compared to young adults. Participants evaluated their ability to recognise faces and were also given information about their ability to perceive and recognise faces. The information was ostensibly based on an objective measure of their ability, but in actuality, participants had been randomly assigned the information they received (high ability, low ability or no information control). Following this information, face recognition accuracy for a set of previously studied faces was measured using a remember–know memory paradigm. Older adults rated their ability to recognise faces as poorer compared to young adults. Additionally, negative information about face recognition ability improved only older adults' ability to recognise a previously seen face. Older adults were also found to engage in more familiarity than item-specific processing than young adults, but information about their face recognition ability did not affect face processing style. The role that older adults' memory beliefs have in the meta-cognitive strategies they employ is discussed.     

Parallel effects of aging and time pressure on memory for source: evidence from the spacing effect

Two experiments address the degree to which item memory-the ability to remember that a word has been presented-is dissociable from source memory, or the ability to remember the context of that word's presentation. Spacing (as opposed to massing) an item's two presentations leads young adults to endorse that item more often when they are instructed to recognize it and to reject it more often when they are instructed to exclude it. Old adults also enjoy beneficial effects of spacing when the item is to be recognized, but suffer detrimental effects of the spacing manipulation when the item is to be rejected: They falsely endorse the spaced to-be-rejected items more than the massed ones. This dissociation also obtains with young subjects under conditions of increased time pressure: Under normal decision conditions, the ability to endorse to-be-recognized items and to reject to-be-rejected items increases with spacing; under speeded conditions, the ability to reject the latter items decreases with spacing. The results support the notion that source memory is selectively impaired in the elderly and that it is difficult to access mnemonic information about source under time pressure.     

Post-encoding emotional arousal enhances consolidation of item memory,but not reality-monitoring source memory

The current study examined whether the effect of post-encoding emotional arousal on item memory extends to reality-monitoring source memory and, if so, whether the effect depends on emotionality of learning stimuli and testing format. In Experiment 1, participants encoded neutral words and imagined or viewed their corresponding object pictures. Then they watched a neutral, positive, or negative video. The 24-hour delayed test showed that emotional arousal had little effect on both item memory and reality-monitoring source memory. Experiment 2 was similar except that participants encoded neutral, positive, and negative words and imagined or viewed their corresponding object pictures. The results showed that positive and negative emotional arousal induced after encoding enhanced consolidation of item memory, but not reality-monitoring source memory, regardless of emotionality of learning stimuli. Experiment 3, identical to Experiment 2 except that participants were tested only on source memory for all the encoded items, still showed that post-encoding emotional arousal had little effect on consolidation of reality-monitoring source memory. Taken together, regardless of emotionality of learning stimuli and regardless of testing format of source memory (conjunction test vs. independent test), the facilitatory effect of post-encoding emotional arousal on item memory does not generalize to reality-monitoring source memory.     

Self-referencing enhances memory specificity with age

Self-referencing has been identified as an advantageous mnemonic strategy for young and older adults. However, little research has investigated the ways in which self-referencing may influence older adults' memory for details, which is typically impaired with age, beyond memory for the item itself. Experiment 1 assessed the effects of self- and other-referencing on memory for visually detailed pictures of objects in thirty-two young and thirty-two older adults. Results indicate that self- and close other-referencing similarly enhance general (item) and specific (detail) recognition for both young and older adults relative to the distant other condition. Experiment 2 extended these findings to source memory, with young and older adults encoding verbal information in self-referent, semantic, and structural conditions. Findings suggest that self-referencing provides an age-equivalent boost in general memory and specific memory for specific source details. We conclude that the mnemonic benefits of referencing the self extend to specific memory for visual and verbal information across the lifespan.     

Reality monitoring and memory distortion: Effects of negative, arousing content

Although individuals often claim to vividly remember negatively arousing information, few studies have been performed to examine whether this emotional information is remembered more accurately than nonemotional information. In the present study, we investigated whether the emotional content of items modulates the accuracy with which individuals make reality-monitoring decisions. Participants (young adults, 18-35 years of age) distinguished imagined from seen words (Experiments 1 and 3A) or objects (Experiments 2 and 3B). Half of the items studied in each condition (presented and imagined) were negative and arousing, and half were neutral. The participants mistook imagined items for presented ones, but the number of reality-monitoring errors was lower for the arousing items than for the neutral items. Negative, arousing items appear to be remembered with contextual detail more frequently than are neutral items, leading memory for this emotional information to be less prone to distortion than is memory for neutral information. Thus, negative arousal can enhance not only the subjective vividness of a memory, but also a memory's accuracy.     

Memory for general and specific value information in younger and older adults: Measuring the limits of strategic control

The ability to selectively remember important information is a critical function of memory. Although previous research has suggested that older adults are impaired in a variety of episodic memory tasks, recent work has demonstrated that older adults can selectively remember high-value information. In the present research, we examined how younger and older adults selectively remembered words with various assigned numeric point values, to see whether younger adults could remember more specific value information than could older adults. Both groups were equally good at recalling point values when recalling the range of high-value words, but younger adults outperformed older adults when recalling specific values. Although older adults were more likely to recognize negative value words, both groups exhibited control by not recalling negative value information. The findings suggest that although both groups retain high-value information, older adults rely more on gist-based encoding and retrieval operations, whereas younger adults are able to remember specific numeric value information.     

Adult age differences in memory for schema-consistent and schema-inconsistent objects in a real-world setting

The present study examined age-related differences in the inconsistency effect, in which memory is enhanced for schema-inconsistent information compared to schema-consistent information. Young and older adults studied schema-consistent and schema-inconsistent objects in an academic office under either intentional or incidental encoding instructions, and were given two recognition tests either immediately or after 48 hr: A yes/no item recognition test that included modified remember/know judgments and a token recognition test that required determining whether an original object was replaced with a different object with the same name. Young and older adults showed equivalent inconsistency effects in both item and token recognition tests, although older adults reported phenomenologically less rich memories of schema-inconsistent objects relative to young adults. These findings run counter to previous reports suggesting that aging is associated with processing declines at encoding that impair memory for details of schema-inconsistent or distinctive events. The results are consistent with a retrieval-based account in which age-related difficulties in retrieving contextual details can be offset by environmental support.     

Older adults encode more,not less: evidence for age-related attentional broadening

Previous work has shown that older adults attend to and implicitly remember more distracting information than young adults; however, it is unknown whether they show a corresponding decrease in implicit memory for targets in the presence of distracters. Using implicit memory tests, we asked whether older adults show a tradeoff in memory between targets and distracters. Here, young and older adults performed a selective attention task in which they were instructed to attend to target pictures and ignore superimposed distracter words. We measured priming for distracter words using fragment completion and for target pictures using naming time. Older adults showed greater priming for distracting words compared to young adults, but equivalent priming for target pictures. These results suggest that older adults have a broader attentional scope than young adults, encompassing both relevant and irrelevant information.     

Amygdala responses to emotionally valenced stimuli in older and younger adults

Abstract— As they age, adults experience less negative emotion, come to pay less attention to negative than to positive emotional stimuli, and become less likely to remember negative than positive emotional materials. This profile of findings suggests that, with age, the amygdala may show decreased reactivity to negative information while maintaining or increasing its reactivity to positive information. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess whether amygdala activation in response to positive and negative emotional pictures changes with age. Both older and younger adults showed greater activation in the amygdala for emotional than for neutral pictures; however, for older adults, seeing positive pictures led to greater amygdala activation than seeing negative pictures, whereas this was not the case for younger adults.     

Response bias in "remembering" emotional stimuli: a new perspective on age differences

Older adults sometimes show a recall advantage for emotionally positive, rather than neutral or negative, stimuli (S. T. Charles, M. Mather, & L. L. Carstensen, 2003). In contrast, younger adults respond "old" and "remember" more often to negative materials in recognition tests. For younger adults, both effects are due to response bias changes rather than to enhanced memory accuracy (S. Dougal & C. M. Rotello, 2007). We presented older and younger adults with emotional and neutral stimuli in a remember-know paradigm. Signal-detection and model-based analyses showed that memory accuracy did not differ for the neutral, negative, and positive stimuli, and that "remember" responses did not reflect the use of recollection. However, both age groups showed large and significant response bias effects of emotion: Younger adults tended to say "old" and "remember" more often in response to negative words than to positive and neutral words, whereas older adults responded "old" and "remember" more often to both positive and negative words than to neutral stimuli.     

Effects of aging and encoding instructions on emotion-induced memory trade-offs

The effects of emotion on memory are often described in terms of trade-offs: People often remember central, emotional information at the expense of background details. The present experiment examined the effects of aging and encoding instructions on participants' ability to remember the details of central emotional objects and the backgrounds on which those objects were placed. When young and older adults passively viewed scenes, both age groups showed strong emotion-induced trade-offs. They were able to remember the visual details as well as the general theme of the emotional object, but they had difficulties remembering the visual specifics of the scene background. Age differences emerged, however, when participants were given encoding instructions that emphasized elaborative encoding of the entire scene. With these instructions, young adults overcame the trade-offs (i.e., they no longer showed impairing effects of emotion), whereas older adults continued to show good memory for the emotional object but poor memory for its background. These results suggest that aging impairs the ability to flexibly disengage attention from the negative arousing elements of scenes, preventing the successful encoding of nonemotional aspects of the environment.     

老年人对情绪性事件的情景模拟:回忆过去与想象未来

研究采用自传体访谈技术,首次考察了老年人在对情绪性事件进行回忆和想象中生成的内部细节和外部细节数量,及其对回忆和想象内容的主观评估。结果发现:(1)无论是回忆还是想象任务,老年人都比年轻人提供了更少的内部细节和略多的外部细节;(2)与年轻人相似,老年人在想象未来积极事件时产生了更多的内部细节,表现出对积极信息的加工偏好;(3)老年人比年轻人更倾向于认为想象的事件与过去发生的事件相似度高,表明该群体在想象过程中更多地依赖了过去的记忆。该结果揭示了老年人对情绪性事件的回忆和想象特点,说明在回忆和想象过程中出现的与年龄有关的缺陷同样会体现在情绪性事件中,这很好地支持了建构性情景模拟假说。     

Age-related differences in the distractor previewing effect with schematic faces of emotions

Young and older adults searched for a unique face in a set of three schematic faces and identified a secondary feature of the target. The faces could be negative, positive, or neutral. Young adults were slower and less accurate in searching for a negative face among neutral faces when they had previewed a display of negative faces than when they had previewed neutral faces, indicating an emotional distractor previewing effect (DPE), but this effect was eliminated with inverted faces. The DPE is an index of inter-trial inhibition to keep attention away from previewed, non-target information. Older adults also showed such an emotional DPE, but it was present with both upright and inverted faces. These results show that, in general, both young and old participants are sensitive to trial history, yet the different patterns of results suggest that these two groups remember and use different types of perceptual information when searching through emotional faces.     

Memory for positive,negative and neutral events in younger and older adults: Does emotion influence binding in event memory?

When remembering an event, it is important to remember both the features of the event (e.g., a person and an action) and the connections among features (e.g., who performed which action). Emotion often enhances memory for stimulus features, but the relationship between emotion and the binding of features in memory is unclear. Younger and older adults attempted to remember events in which a person performed a negative, positive or neutral action. Memory for the action was enhanced by emotion, but emotion did not enhance the ability of participants to remember which person performed which action. Older adults were more likely than younger adults to make binding errors in which they incorrectly remembered a familiar actor performing a familiar action that had actually been performed by someone else, and this age-related associative deficit was found for both neutral and emotional actions. Emotion not only increased correct recognition of old events for older and younger adults but also increased false recognition of events in which a familiar actor performed a familiar action that had been performed by someone else. Thus, although emotion may enhance memory for the features of an event, it does not increase the accuracy of remembering who performed which action.     

Effects of emotion on item and source memory in young and older adults

Emotional experiences are easier to remember than neutral ones, but whether memory for all aspects of an experience is improved by emotion remains unclear. Some researchers have argued that the influence of emotion on memory is different for item than for source information, whereas others have argued that emotion affects both similarly. Also, whether item and source memory are affected by emotion in older people in the same way as in young people is currently unclear. We examined item and source memory for emotional and neutral materials in young and older adults. Memory for emotional items was superior to memory for neutral items, whereas there was no difference in source memory. Overall, item and source memory were poorer in older people than in young people, but emotion seemed to have a similar effect on both age groups. Although emotional content was remembered better than neutral content, this benefit did not apply to source memory. However, varying the emotionality of the source (i.e., the voice in Experiment 3) improved memory for the source, and this effect was greater in young than in older people. Tone of voice had no effect on item memory in older people, but the effect was variable in the young and may depend on the extent to which the tone of voice moderates the interpretation of the content.     

Maximizing the benefits and minimizing the costs of repeated memory tests for older adults

Repeatedly trying to remember information can help people remember more but can also lead to inaccuracies. Two experiments examined whether the costs of repeated recall efforts can be minimized for older adults by using memory tests that require specification of the source of recalled items. Participants saw and imagined pictures and then took 3 successive recall tests in which they either indicated the source of each remembered item (source recall) or simply recalled the items without specification of their source (free recall). Results showed that recall increased systematically from Test 1 to Test 3, although the rate of increase was less marked for older adults, and older adults recalled less overall. After the free recall tests, older adults made more source misattributions (claiming to have seen imagined items) than did young adults, but after the source recall tests, age differences were not significant. Thus, repeatedly recalling items while considering their source was associated with benefits in terms of increased recall and fewer costs in terms of source errors.     

A double dissociation of implicit and explicit memory in younger and older adults

This study examined whether age-related differences in cognition influence later memory for irrelevant, or distracting, information. In Experiments 1 and 2, older adults had greater implicit memory for irrelevant information than younger adults did. When explicit memory was assessed, however, the pattern of results reversed: Younger adults performed better than older adults on an explicit memory test for the previously irrelevant information, and older adults performed less well than they had on the implicit test. Experiment 3 investigated whether this differential pattern was attributable to an age-related decline in encoding resources, by reducing the encoding resources of younger adults with a secondary task; their performance perfectly simulated the pattern shown by the older adults in the first two experiments. Both older and younger adults may remember irrelevant information, but they remember it in different ways because of age-related changes in how information is processed at encoding and utilized at retrieval.     

Aging, source memory, and emotion

In 2 experiments we assessed younger and older adults' ability to remember contextual information about an event. Each experiment examined memory for 3 different types of contextual information: (a) perceptual information (e.g., location of an item); (b) conceptual, nonemotional information (e.g., quality of an item); and (c) conceptual, emotional information (e.g., safety of an item). Consistent with a large literature on aging and source memory, younger adults outperformed older adults when the contextual information was perceptual in nature and when it was conceptual, but not emotional. Age differences in source memory were eliminated, however, when participants recalled emotional source information. These findings suggest that emotional information differentially engages older adults, possibly evoking enhanced elaborations and associations. The data are also consistent with a growing literature, suggesting that emotional processing remains stable with age (e.g., Carstensen & Turk-Charles, 1994, 1998; Isaacowitz, Charles, & Carstensen, 2000).     

Personal relevance modulates the positivity bias in recall of emotional pictures in older adults

Some studies have suggested that older adults remember more positive than negative valence information, relative to younger adults, whereas other studies have reported no such difference. We tested whether differences in encoding instructions and in personal relevance could account for these inconsistencies. Younger and older adults were instructed either to passively view positive, negative, and neutral pictures or to actively categorize them by valence. On a subsequent incidental recall test, older adults recalled equal numbers of positive and negative pictures, whereas younger adults recalled negative pictures best. There was no effect of encoding instructions. Crucially, when the pictures were grouped into high and low personal relevance, a positivity bias emerged in older adults only for low-relevance pictures, suggesting that the personal relevance of pictures may be the factor underlying cross-study differences.     

Life-span development of visual working memory: when is feature binding difficult?

We asked whether the ability to keep in working memory the binding between a visual object and its spatial location changes with development across the life span more than memory for item information. Paired arrays of colored squares were identical or differed in the color of one square, and in the latter case, the changed color was unique on that trial (item change) or was duplicated elsewhere in the array (color-location binding change). Children (8-10 and 11-12 years old) and older adults (65-85 years old) showed deficits relative to young adults. These were only partly simulated by dividing attention in young adults. The older adults had an additional deficiency, specifically in binding information, which was evident only when item- and binding-change trials were mixed together. In that situation, the older adults often overlooked the more subtle, binding-type changes. Some working memory processes related to binding undergo life-span development in an inverted-U shape, whereas other, bias- and salience-related processes that influence the use of binding information seem to develop monotonically.