Older adults show a self-reference effect for narrative information

Mine for life: Charting ownership effects in memory from adolescence to old age

This study investigates the self-reference effect (SRE) with an ownership memory task across several age groups, providing the first age exploration of implicit ownership memory biases from adolescence to older adulthood (N = 159). Using a well-established ownership task, participants were required to sort images of grocery items as belonging to themselves or to a fictitious unnamed Other. After sorting and a brief distractor task, participants completed a surprise one-step source memory test. Overall, there was a robust SRE, with greater source memory accuracy for self-owned items. The SRE attenuated with age, such that the magnitude of difference between self and other memory diminished into older adulthood. Importantly, these findings were not due to a deterioration of memory for self-owned items, but rather an increase in memory performance for other-owned items. Linear mixed effects analyses showed self-biases in reaction times, such that self-owned items were identified more rapidly compared with other owned items. Again, age interacted with this effect showing that the responses of older adults were slowed, especially for other-owned items. Several theoretical implications were drawn from these findings, but we suggest that older adults may not experience ownership-related biases to the same degree as younger adults. Consequently, SREs through the lens of mere ownership may attenuate with age.

The contributions of spatial context and imagery to the recollection of single words

A number of theories of hippocampal function have placed spatial context at the center of richly recollected memories, but the subjective and objective ways that spatial context underlies the recollection of single words has been largely overlooked and underexplained. In this study, we conducted three experiments to investigate the involvement of spatial context in the recollection of single words. In all three experiments, participants encoded single words with varying features such as location and color. The subjective experience of recollection was measured using remember/know judgments and participant self-report of the types of information they recollected about the words. Objectively, recollection was measured using source memory judgments for both spatial and non-spatial features associated with the words. Our results provide evidence that spatial context frequently accompanies the recollection of single, isolated words, reviving discussions on the role of the hippocampus in spatial and detailed recollection.

Influence of self-referential mode on memory for aMCI patients

One's concept of the self can act as a schema, in some cases facilitating memory performance but in other cases making memory more prone to errors. In this study, we attempted to induce long-lasting self-reference effects through an autobiographical mode in younger and older adults, as well as patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), predicting that a self-referential mode of thought would benefit memory. Participants first either recalled autobiographical memories or described three neutral photographs in a narrative condition. This was followed by a conventional self-referencing task. At retrieval, participants completed a recognition task. Contrary to our prediction, the self-referencing benefit emerged consistently under autobiographical and narrative modes across all groups. Although our findings indicate that self-referencing can benefit memory, it carries the risk of increasing false alarm rates when induced through an autobiographical mode and consequently the strategy should be utilized with caution.

Picture This: A Review of Research Relating to Narrative Processing by Moving Image Versus Language

Reading fiction for pleasure is robustly correlated with improved cognitive attainment and other benefits. It is also in decline among young people in developed nations, in part because of competition from moving image fiction. We review existing research on the differences between reading or hearing verbal fiction and watching moving image fiction, as well as looking more broadly at research on image or text interactions and visual versus verbal processing. We conclude that verbal narrative generates more diverse responses than moving image narrative. We note that reading and viewing narrative are different tasks, with different cognitive loads. Viewing moving image narrative mostly involves visual processing with some working memory engagement, whereas reading narrative involves verbal processing, visual imagery, and personal memory (Xu et al., 2005). Attempts to compare the two by creating equivalent stimuli and task demands face a number of challenges. We discuss the difficulties of such comparative approaches. We then investigate the possibility of identifying lower level processing mechanisms that might distinguish cognition of the two media and propose internal scene construction and working memory as foci for future research. Although many of the sources we draw on concentrate on English-speaking participants in European or North American settings, we also cover material relating to speakers of Dutch, German, Hebrew, and Japanese in their respective countries, and studies of a remote Turkish mountain community.

Aging and recognition memory: A meta-analysis

Recognizing a stimulus as previously encountered is a crucial everyday life skill and a critical task motivating theoretical development in models of human memory. Although there are clear age-related memory deficits in tasks requiring recall or memory for context, the existence and nature of age differences in recognition memory remain unclear. The nature of any such deficits is critical to understanding the effects of age on memory because recognition tasks allow fewer strategic backdoors to supporting memory than do tasks of recall. Consequently, recognition may provide the purest measure of age-related memory deficit of all standard memory tasks. We conducted a meta-analysis of 232 prior experiments on age differences in recognition memory. As an organizing framework, we used signal-detection theory (Green & Swets, 1966; Macmillan & Creelman, 2005) to characterize recognition memory in terms of both discrimination between studied items and unstudied lures (d') and response bias or criterion (c). Relative to young adults, older adults showed reduced discrimination accuracy and a more liberal response criterion (i.e., greater tendency to term items new). Both of these effects were influenced by multiple, differing variables, with larger age deficits when studied material must be discriminated from familiar or related material, but smaller when studying semantically rich materials. These results support a view in which neither the self-initiation of mnemonic processes nor the deployment of strategic processes is the only source of age-related memory deficits, and they add to our understanding of the mechanisms underlying those changes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Self-Reference Effect and Self-Reference Recollection Effect for Trait Adjectives in Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment

OBJECTIVES

The self-reference effect (SRE), enhanced memory for self-related information, has been studied in healthy young and older adults but has had little investigation in people with age-related memory disorders, such as amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). Self-referential encoding may help to improve episodic memory in aMCI. Additionally, self-referential processing has been shown to benefit recollection, the vivid re-experiencing of past events, a phenomenon that has been termed the self-reference recollection effect (SRRE; Conway & Dewhurst, 1995). Furthermore, it remains unclear whether the valence of stimuli influences the appearance of the SRE and SRRE.

METHODS

The current study investigated the SRE and SRRE for trait adjective words in 20 individuals with aMCI and 30 healthy older adult controls. Ninety trait adjective words were allocated to self-reference, semantic, or structural encoding conditions; memory was later tested using a recognition test.

RESULTS

While healthy older adults showed a SRE, individuals with aMCI did not benefit from self-referential encoding over and above that of semantic encoding (an effect of "deep encoding"). A similar pattern was apparent for the SRRE; healthy controls showed enhanced recollection for words encoded in the self-reference condition, while the aMCI group did not show specific benefit to recollection for self-referenced over semantically encoded items. No effects of valence were found.

CONCLUSIONS

These results indicate that while memory for trait adjective words can be improved in aMCI with deep encoding strategies (whether self-reference or semantic), self-referencing does not provide an additional benefit. (JINS, 2018, 24, 821-832).

Age-Based Positivity Effects in Imagining and Recalling Future Positive and Negative Autobiographical Events

Thoughts about the future reflect personal goals, and projections into the future enrich our emotional life. Researchers have taken an interest in determining whether the tendency to remember more positive than negative emotional events observed when recalling past events also appears when remembering imagined future events. The objective of this study was to examine the age-based positivity effect of recall for future positive and negative autobiographical events in young and older adults. Representative future events were first established to develop the cues used to prompt personal future events. In the production task, the participants were presented with eight positive and eight negative random future events of young or older adults as a model and the corresponding cues to generate their own positive and negative future autobiographical events. In the recall task, the participants recovered as many experiences as they could of the model and the positive and negative events produced by themselves. The participants correctly recalled more positive than negative events and committed more errors for negative than positive events, showing a clear tendency in both young and older adults to recall future imagined events as positive. Regarding age, the young adults recalled more events than the older participants whilst the older participants in particular showed better recall of their own imagined future events than the model’s events, and committed more errors when recalling the model’s events than their own imagined events. Regarding the positivity effect in incorrect recall, more than half of the errors were valence changes, most of these being from negative to positive events, and these valence changes were more pronounced in the older than in the younger adults. In general, there were fewer differences between young and older adults in the recall of positive events in comparison with negative events. Our findings suggest that people are well disposed toward recalling positive imagined future events and preserve a positive emotional state, suppressing negative memories.