Abstract
The retrieval of autobiographical memories is an integral part of everyday social interactions. Prior laboratory research has revealed that older age is associated with a reduction in the retrieval of autobiographical episodic memories, and the ability to elaborate these memories with episodic details. However, how age-related reductions in episodic specificity unfold in everyday social contexts remains largely unknown. Also, constraints of the laboratory-based approach have limited our understanding of how autobiographical semantic memory is linked to older age. To address these gaps in knowledge, we used a smartphone application known as the Electronically Activated Recorder, or “EAR,” to unobtrusively capture real-world conversations over 4 days. In a sample of 102 cognitively normal older adults, we extracted instances where memories and future thoughts were shared by the participants, and we scored the shared episodic memories and future thoughts for their make-up of episodic and semantic detail. We found that older age was associated with a reduction in real-world sharing of autobiographical episodic and semantic memories. We also found that older age was linked to less episodically and semantically detailed descriptions of autobiographical episodic memories. Frequency and level of detail of shared future thoughts yielded weaker relationships with age, which may be related to the low frequency of future thoughts in general. Similar to laboratory research, there was no correlation between autobiographical episodic detail sharing and a standard episodic memory test. However, in contrast to laboratory studies, episodic detail production while sharing autobiographical episodic memories was weakly related to episodic detail production while describing future events, unrelated to working memory, and not different between men and women. Overall, our findings provide novel evidence of how older age relates to episodic specificity when autobiographical memories are assessed unobtrusively and objectively “in the wild.”
Highlights
Remembering experiences from our personal history, or autobiographical memories, is thought to aid in the development and maintenance of the self, facilitate social communication, and guide behavior (Pillemer, 1992; Bluck and Alea, 2002; Pasupathi et al, 2002; Bluck, 2003; Bluck et al, 2005)
Excellent reliability was achieved for the total number of details produced across sound files that contained an autobiographical episodic memory or future thought, whether analyzed together or separately (Cronbach’s alpha range 0.91–0.995)
To ensure that individual scores were reliable, we identified four participants who provided fewer than five sound files with an autobiographical memory or autobiographical future thought and an average of 7.50 (SD = 3.11) total details
Summary
Remembering experiences from our personal history, or autobiographical memories, is thought to aid in the development and maintenance of the self, facilitate social communication, and guide behavior (Pillemer, 1992; Bluck and Alea, 2002; Pasupathi et al, 2002; Bluck, 2003; Bluck et al, 2005). The act of recalling and sharing autobiographical memories allows us to communicate a wealth of information with others, from general knowledge to details of a one-time event (Conway and Pleydell-Pearce, 2000), with each form serving distinct purposes (Waters et al, 2014) Such disclosures of personal information in conversation are thought to increase intimacy and empathy within relationships, provide opportunities to teach others, and aid decision making (Alea and Bluck, 2003, 2007). A natural alteration in narrative style, perhaps related to new perspectives on a lifetime of experiences or changes in language use, could contribute to reduced episodic specificity with age (James et al, 1998; Trunk and Abrams, 2009; Gaesser et al, 2011) Both of these explanations can account for why prior work has commonly found that reduced episodic retrieval is accompanied by increased semantic retrieval. Regardless of the reason(s), these findings and theories suggest that in everyday life, increased age may be linked to less sharing of one’s episodic past
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