成员关系对协作提取成绩的影响

当人们与搭档组成社会群体一起协作讨论某些已经发生的事件或经验时, 该社会群体中的成员关系对协作提取成绩的影响仍不明确。本研究通过两项实验, 分别使用语词词单和情景故事作为实验材料, 考察成员关系(包括关系类型和关系时长)对协作提取成绩的影响。研究结果表明, 当记忆的材料为语词词单时, 青年陌生组出现了协作抑制; 而当记忆的材料为情景故事时, 青年夫妻和老年夫妻组均出现了协作促进。此外, 老年夫妻在协作提取情景故事的过程中使用的有效交流策略更多, 且这些有效交流策略的使用与更高的协作提取成绩有关。该结果支持了具有长时亲密关系的老年夫妻之间的“交互记忆系统”对协作促进的关键作用, 为理解成员关系对协作提取成绩的影响提供了全面的证据。     

“Going episodic”: collaborative inhibition and facilitation when long-married couples remember together

Two complementary approaches to the study of collaborative remembering have produced contrasting results. In the experimental “collaborative recall” approach within cognitive psychology, collaborative remembering typically results in “collaborative inhibition”: laboratory groups recall fewer items than their estimated potential. In the cognitive ageing approach, collaborative remembering with a partner or spouse may provide cueing and support to benefit older adults’ performance on everyday memory tasks. To combine the value of experimental and cognitive ageing approaches, we tested the effects of collaborative remembering in older, long-married couples who recalled a non-personal word list and a personal semantic list of shared trips. We scored amount recalled as well as the kinds of details remembered. We found evidence for collaborative inhibition across both tasks when scored strictly as number of list items recalled. However, we found collaborative facilitation of specific episodic details on the personal semantic list, details which were not strictly required for the completion of the task. In fact, there was a trade-off between recall of specific episodic details and number of trips recalled during collaboration. We discuss these results in terms of the functions of shared remembering and what constitutes memory success, particularly for intimate groups and for older adults.     

Self-referencing enhances recollection in both young and older adults

Processing information in relation to the self enhances subsequent item recognition in both young and older adults and further enhances recollection at least in the young. Because older adults experience recollection memory deficits, it is unknown whether self-referencing improves recollection in older adults. We examined recollection benefits from self-referential encoding in older and younger adults and further examined the quality and quantity of episodic details facilitated by self-referencing. We further investigated the influence of valence on recollection, given prior findings of age group differences in emotional memory (i.e., “positivity effects”). Across the two experiments, young and older adults processed positive and negative adjectives either for self-relevance or for semantic meaning. We found that self-referencing, relative to semantic encoding, increased recollection memory in both age groups. In Experiment 1, both groups remembered proportionally more negative than positive items when adjectives were processed semantically; however, when adjectives were processed self-referentially, both groups exhibited evidence of better recollection for the positive items, inconsistent with a positivity effect in aging. In Experiment 2, both groups reported more episodic details associated with recollected items, as measured by a memory characteristic questionnaire, for the self-reference relative to the semantic condition. Overall, these data suggest that self-referencing leads to detail-rich memory representations reflected in higher rates of recollection across age.     

Remembering the past and imagining the future: attachment effects on production of episodic details in close relationships

Attachment theories and studies have shown that Internal Working Models (IWMs) can impact autobiographical memory and future-oriented information processing relevant to close relationships. According to the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis (CESH), both remembering the past and imagining the future rely on episodic memory. We hypothesised that one way IWMs may bridge past experiences and future adaptations is via episodic memory. The present study investigated the association between attachment and episodic specificity in attachment-relevant and attachment-irrelevant memory and imagination among young and older adults. We measured the attachment style of 37 young adults and 40 older adults, and then asked them to remember or imagine attachment-relevant and attachment-irrelevant events. Participants’ narratives were coded for internal details (i.e., episodic) and external details (e.g., semantic, repetitions). The results showed that across age group, secure individuals generated more internal details and fewer external details in attachment-relevant tasks compared to attachment-irrelevant tasks; these differences were not observed in insecure individuals. These findings support the CESH and provide a new perspective to understand the function of IWMs.     

When does prior knowledge disproportionately benefit older adults’ memory?

Material consistent with knowledge/experience is generally more memorable than material inconsistent with knowledge/experience – an effect that can be more extreme in older adults. Four experiments investigated knowledge effects on memory with young and older adults. Memory for familiar and unfamiliar proverbs (Experiment 1) and for common and uncommon scenes (Experiment 2) showed similar knowledge effects across age groups. Memory for person-consistent and person-neutral actions (Experiment 3) showed a greater benefit of prior knowledge in older adults. For cued recall of related and unrelated word pairs (Experiment 4), older adults benefited more from prior knowledge only when it provided uniquely useful additional information beyond the episodic association itself. The current data and literature suggest that prior knowledge has the age-dissociable mnemonic properties of (1) improving memory for the episodes themselves (age invariant), and (2) providing conceptual information about the tasks/stimuli extrinsically to the actual episodic memory (particularly aiding older adults).     

Episodic future thinking: Linking neuropsychological performance with episodic detail in young and old adults

Episodic future thinking (EFT) has been linked with our ability to remember past events. However, its specific neurocognitive subprocesses have remained elusive. In Experiment 1, a study of healthy older adults was conducted to investigate the candidate subprocesses of EFT. Participants completed a standard EFT cue word task, two memory measures (Verbal Paired Associates I, Source Memory), and two measures of executive function (Trail Making Test, Tower Test). In Experiment 2, healthy young adults also completed an EFT task and neuropsychological measures. The link between neurocognitive measures and five characteristics of EFT was investigated. Specifically, it was found that Source Memory and Trail Making Test performance predicted the episodic specificity of future events in older but not younger adults. Replicating previous findings, older adults produced future events with greater semantic but fewer episodic details than did young adults. These results extend the data and emphasize the importance of the multiple subprocesses underlying EFT.     

Collaboration and prospective memory: comparing nominal and collaborative group performance in strangers and couples

To perform prospective memory (PM) tasks in day-to-day life, we often enlist the help of others. Yet the effects of collaboration on PM are largely unknown. Adopting the methodology of the “collaborative recall paradigm”, we tested whether stranger dyads (Experiment 1) and intimate couples (Experiment 2) would perform better on a “Virtual Week” task when working together or each working separately. In Experiment 1, we found evidence of collaborative inhibition: collaborating strangers did not perform to their pooled individual potential, although the effect was modulated by PM task difficulty. We also found that the overall collaborative inhibition effect was attributable to both the retrospective and prospective components of PM. In Experiment 2 however, there was no collaborative inhibition: there was no significant difference in performance between couples working together or separately. Our findings suggest potential costs of collaboration to PM. Intimate relationships may reduce the usual costs of collaboration, with implications for intervention training programmes and for populations who most need PM support.     

Discriminating Semantic from Episodic Relatedness in Young and Older Adults

ABSTRACT

The ability of young (aged 18–30) and older (aged 60–80) adults to discriminate pre-experimental (semantic) from experimental (episodic) associations was examined. Participants studied a list containing semantically related and unrelated word pairs and then made either associative recognition (Experiments 1a and b) or semantic relatedness (Experiment 2) judgments at various response deadlines. For associative recognition judgments, both young and older adults benefited from semantic relatedness, leading to more hits for related than unrelated pairs, and at the long response deadline, older adults' performance on those pairs matched that of young participants. Also, both young and older adults demonstrated superior discrimination for unrelated lures whose members had originally been studied in related pairs – evidence for recall-to-reject processing in both age groups. In making semantic relatedness judgments, both young and older adults showed an episodic priming effect. When older adults can rely on long-standing associations, their performance resembles that of young adults – both in associative recognition and in episodic priming.     

Discounting input from older adults: the role of age salience on partner age effects in the social contagion of memory

Three experiments examined the impact of partner age on the magnitude of socially suggested false memories. Young participants recalled household scenes in collaboration with an implied young or older adult partner who intentionally recalled false items. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with only the age of their partner (low age-salience context); in Experiment 2, participants were presented with the age of their partner along with a photograph and biographical information about their partner (high age-salience context); in Experiment 3, age salience was varied within the same experiment. Across experiments, participants in both the low age-salience and high age-salience contexts incorporated their partners’ misleading suggestions into their own subsequent recall and recognition reports, thus demonstrating social contagion with implied partners. Importantly, the effect of partner age differed across conditions. Participants in the high age-salience context were less likely to incorporate misleading suggestions from older adult partners than from young adult partners, but participants in the low age-salience context were equally likely to incorporate suggestions from young and older adult partners. Participants discount the memory of older adult partners only when age is highly salient.     

Gist-based memory for prices and “better buys” in younger and older adults

Ageing typically leads to various memory deficits which results in older adults’ tendency to remember more general information and rely on gist memory. The current study examined if younger and older adults could remember which of two comparable grocery items (e.g., two similar but different jams) was paired with a lower price (the “better buy”). Participants studied lists of grocery items and their prices, in which the two items in each category were presented consecutively (Experiment 1), or separated by intervening items (Experiment 2). At test, participants were asked to identify the “better buy” and recall the price of both items. There were negligible age-related differences for the “better buy” in Experiment 1, but age-related differences were present in Experiment 2 when there were greater memory demands involved in comparing the two items. Together, these findings suggest that when price information of two items can be evaluated and compared within a short period of time, older adults can form stable gist-based memory for prices, but that this is impaired with longer delays. We relate the findings to age-related changes in the use of gist and verbatim memory when remembering prices, as well as the associative deficit account of cognitive ageing.     

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。     

Phenomenological characteristics of emotional memories in younger and older adults

Older adults sometimes show a “positivity effect” in memory, remembering proportionally more positive information than younger adults. Using a modified Memory Characteristics Questionnaire, this study examined whether emotional valence impacts the phenomenological qualities of young and older adults’ memories. Ageing did not impact the effect of valence on the qualities of high-arousal memories. However, ageing sometimes impacted subjective memory for details of low-arousal memories: In Experiment 2, older adults reported remembering more thoughts, feelings, and temporal order details about positive low-arousal stimuli, while young adults’ ratings for those dimensions were higher for negative low-arousal stimuli. These findings suggest that valence most readily affects the qualities of young and older adults’ emotional memories when those memories are low in arousal.     

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.     

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.     

Aging,source memory,and the experience of “remembering”

In a previous study, we found source memory for perceptual features to differentiate between younger but not older adults’ reports of recollective (“remember”; R) and “know” (K) experiences. In two experiments with younger (17–30 years) and older (64–81 years) participants, we examined whether memory for meaningful speaker sources would accompany older adults’ recollective experience. Indeed, memory for male and female speakers (but not partial memory for gender; Experiment 1) as well as bound memory for speakers and their facial expressions (Experiment 2) distinguished between both younger and older adults’ RK reports. Thus, memory for some sources forms a common basis for younger and older adults’ retrieval experience. Nonetheless, older adults still showed lower objective source memory and lower subjective source-attribution confidence than younger adults when reporting recollective experiences, suggesting that source memory is less relevant to their retrieval experience than for younger adults.     

Ageing and autobiographical memory for emotional and neutral events

We investigated age-related effects in recall of emotional and neutral autobiographical memories. Protocols were scored according to episodic and non-episodic detail categories using the Autobiographical Interview. Young adults recalled a greater number of episodic details compared to older adults, whereas older adults recalled more semantic details, replicating previous findings. Both young and older adults' emotional memories contained more overall detail than neutral ones, with the enhancement from emotion-specific to episodic details, but this did not alter the effect of age group on the pattern of episodic and semantic details. However, the age effect on episodic details was attenuated for neutral autobiographical memories. The findings suggest that age differences for emotional autobiographical recollection might reflect a more general pattern of age-related changes in memory, with impaired recall of episodic components and relative sparing of semantic aspects of autobiographical memory in older adults when compared to young adults.     

How does encoding context affect memory in younger and older adults?

How does encoding context affect memory? Participants studied visually presented words viewed concurrently with a rich (intact face) or weak (scrambled face) image as context and subsequently made “Remember”, “Know”, or “New” judgements to words presented alone. In Experiment 1a, younger, but not older, adults showed higher recollection accuracy to words from rich- than from weak-context encoding trials. The age-related deficit in recollection occurred, in Experiment 1b, even when encoding and retrieval time was doubled in older adults, suggesting that insufficient processing time cannot account for this age-related deficit. In Experiment 1c, dividing attention in young, during encoding, reduced overall memory, though the recollection boost from rich encoding contexts remained, suggesting that reduced attention resources cannot explain this age-related deficit. Experiment 2 showed that an own-age bias, to face images as context, could not explain the age-related differences either. Results suggest that age deficits in recollection stem from a lack of spontaneous binding, or elaboration, of context to target information during encoding.     

老年人情景记忆更新的改变：竞争记忆的回溯性干扰

记忆更新是获取新知识的一种重要能力。大量研究显示老年人情景记忆受损,但鲜有研究探讨老年人情景记忆更新模式的改变。研究在匹配了老年人和年轻人编码程度的前提下,探讨情景记忆更新的老化效应及其潜在的认知机制。我们对AB-AC记忆更新范式进行了创新,同时考察了在项目改变和位置改变条件下的老化效应,并在测试阶段纳入诱饵选项,进一步排除编码程度带来的影响。研究结果显示年轻人能对A-B和A-C记忆分离存储,而老年人更多地受到回溯性记忆干扰,即在A-B测试中出现C的闯入,并且该干扰效应显著地大于诱饵刺激带来的影响。研究结果表明,在年轻人和老年人编码程度匹配的情况下,年轻人的记忆更新通过记忆分化来实现,而老年人更多地受到竞争记忆的回溯性干扰。     

Social relevance enhances memory for impressions in older adults

Previous research has demonstrated that older adults have difficulty retrieving contextual material over items alone. Recent research suggests this deficit can be reduced by adding emotional context, allowing for the possibility that memory for social impressions may show less age-related decline than memory for other types of contextual information. Two studies investigated how orienting to social or self-relevant aspects of information contributed to the learning and retrieval of impressions in young and older adults. Participants encoded impressions of others in conditions varying in the use of self-reference (Experiment 1) and interpersonal meaningfulness (Experiment 2), and completed memory tasks requiring the retrieval of specific traits. For both experiments, age groups remembered similar numbers of impressions. In Experiment 1 using more self-relevant encoding contexts increased memory for impressions over orienting to stimuli in a non-social way, regardless of age. In Experiment 2 older adults had enhanced memory for impressions presented in an interpersonally meaningful relative to a personally irrelevant way, whereas young adults were unaffected by this manipulation. The results provide evidence that increasing social relevance ameliorates age differences in memory for impressions, and enhances older adults’ ability to successfully retrieve contextual information.