Age Differences in Hindsight Bias: The Role of Episodic Memory and Inhibition

Tactile memory impairments in younger and older adults

Human tactile memory allows us to remember and retrieve the multitude of somatosensory experiences we undergo in everyday life. An unsolved question is how tactile memory mechanisms change with increasing age. We here use the ability to remember fine-grained tactile patterns passively presented to the fingertip to investigate age-related changes in tactile memory performance. In experiment 1, we varied the degree of similarity between one learned and several new tactile patterns to test on age-related changes in the "uniqueness" of a stored tactile memory trace. In experiment 2, we varied the degree of stimulus completeness of both known and new tactile patterns to test on age-related changes in the weighting between known and novel tactile information. Results reveal that older adults show only weak impairments in both precision and bias of tactile memories, however, they show specific deficits in reaching peak performance > 85% in both experiments. In addition, both younger and older adults show a pattern completion bias for touch, indicating a higher weighting of known compared to new information. These results allow us to develop new models on how younger and older adults store and recall tactile experiences of the past, and how this influences their everyday behavior.

Supporting autistic adults' episodic memory recall in interviews: The role of executive functions, theory of mind, and language abilities

Autistic people have difficulties recalling episodic memories, including retrieving fewer or less specific and detailed memories compared to typically developing people. However, the ability to effectively recall episodic memories is crucial in many real-world contexts, such as the criminal justice system, medical consultations, and employment interviews. Autistic people’s episodic memory difficulties are most apparent when open, unsupportive questions are used. The ‘Task Support Hypothesis’ posits that autistic people can recall as much information as typically developing people with more supportive questioning. Alongside problems retrieving episodic memories, autistic people also experience difficulties with executive functioning, theory of mind, and expressive language. The current study aimed to assess the impact of these abilities on recall in two previous studies by the authors that compared autistic and typically developing adults on recall specificity in police, healthcare, and employment interviews, and recall quality in employment interviews under unsupported and supported questioning. Under unsupported questioning only, autistic adults’ episodic autobiographical memory recall specificity was predicted by expressive language, whereas for the typically developing group, only theory of mind was a significant predictor. No other predictors were significant across the study. Implications for the task support hypothesis are discussed.

Hindsight Bias and Electoral Outcomes: Satisfaction Counts More Than Winner-Loser Status

The tendency to perceive outcomes as more foreseeable once they are available is a well-known phenomenon. However, research on the cognitive and motivational factors that induce individuals to overestimate the foreseeability of an electoral outcome has yielded inconsistent findings. In three studies based on large-scale electoral surveys (ITANES, Italian National Election Studies), we argued that the tendency to perceive an electoral outcome as foreseeable is positively and consistently associated with satisfaction with the outcome. Across all studies, satisfaction with the outcome was significantly and positively associated with retrospective foreseeability, above and beyond voters’ preference for a “winning” or “losing” party. In Study 3, a measure of memory distortion of pre-electoral forecasts was included, which was only weakly associated with retrospective foreseeability, but not with satisfaction for the outcome, supporting the notion of different levels of hindsight bias associated with different cognitive and motivational factors.