Abstract
Although we know a great deal about the effects of age on memory, we know less about how couples remember together and how day-to-day joint remembering might support memory performance. The possibility of memory support when couples remember together is in striking contrast with the standard finding from the collaborative recall literature that when younger pairs of strangers remember together they impair each other’s recall. In the current study, we examined the individual and joint remembering of 78 individuals who made up 39 older, long-married couples. We studied their performance on three memory tasks, varying in personal relevance: recalling a word list, listing all the countries in Europe, and remembering the names of their mutual friends. Couples gained clear collaborative benefits when they remembered together compared to when alone, especially European countries and mutual friends. Importantly, collaborative success was extremely stable over time, with good collaborators still successful 2 years later, suggesting that successful collaboration may be a stable couple-level difference. However, not all couples benefitted equally. Collaborative success related in part to particular conversational strategies that some couples, often those with discrepant individual abilities, used when collaborating. These findings highlight the value of analyzing individuals within their broader “memory systems” and the power of extending collaborative recall methods to more established intimate groups recalling a broader range of memory materials over longer time scales.
Highlights
We live and age in a social context as members of multiple social groups
Correlates of Successful Collaboration What accounts for these benefits of collaboration? We explored whether couples’ collaborative benefit scores across the Word List, European Countries, and Mutual Friends tasks in Session 2 were associated with husbands’ and wives’ demographic variables, mood and cognitive status (GDS and Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE)), and intimacy scores (PAIR)
Our findings point to clear collaborative benefits when older adults in longstanding, intimate relationships remember together compared to alone. These benefits represent not just an elimination of the usual collaborative inhibition seen in most collaborative recall studies (e.g., Basden et al, 1997; Weldon and Bellinger, 1997; for reviews see Harris et al, 2008; Rajaram, 2011), but genuinely emergent outcomes where couples perform together in ways that are literally “more than the sum of their parts” (Wegner et al, 1985; Wegner, 1987; Harris et al, 2011, 2014a; Barnier et al, 2017)
Summary
We are members of couples, families, schools and universities, work teams and community groups Wegner referred to these intimate, long-standing groups as “transactive memory systems” (Wegner et al, 1985; Wegner, 1987; see Barnier et al, 2017), whereby individuals within such groups coordinate and share their cognitive resources. Sommerlad et al (2017) recently reported that married couples had a 42% lower risk of developing dementia compared to lifelong singletons and a 20% lower risk compared to bereaved individuals These estimates were based on analysis of over 812,000 people involved in 15 aging and dementia studies around the world. These findings highlight the important cognitive and broader health benefits of intimate relationships as well as the value of considering people as part of their social groups in order to understand and predict their cognitive performance
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