The Difference between Right and Wrong: Accuracy of Older and Younger Adults' Story Recall.

Danielle Davis,Susan Bluck,Nicole Alea

doi:10.3390/ijerph120910861

Abstract

Sharing stories is an important social activity in everyday life. This study used fine-grained content analysis to investigate the accuracy of recall of two central story elements: the gist and detail of socially-relevant stories. Younger (M age = 28.06) and older (M age = 75.03) American men and women (N = 63) recalled fictional stories that were coded for (i) accuracy of overall gist and specific gist categories and (ii) accuracy of overall detail and specific detail categories. Findings showed no age group differences in accuracy of overall gist or detail, but differences emerged for specific categories. Older adults more accurately recalled the gist of when the event occurred whereas younger adults more accurately recalled the gist of why the event occurred. These differences were related to episodic memory ability and education. For accuracy in recalling details, there were some age differences, but gender differences were more robust. Overall, women remembered details of these social stories more accurately than men, particularly time and perceptual details. Women were also more likely to accurately remember the gist of when the event occurred. The discussion focuses on how accurate recall of socially-relevant stories is not clearly age-dependent but is related to person characteristics such as gender and episodic memory ability/education.

Highlights

Sharing stories is an everyday memory activity common to most humans [1,2]
Preliminary analyses were conducted to examine the relation between possible covariates, including episodic memory ability and education, with age, gender, overall accuracy of gist, and accuracy of and error in the details recalled from the fictional memory stories
Episodic memory ability was not related to overall accuracy of recalled gist, it was positively related to the overall accuracy of details recalled and negatively related to overall proportion of errors made

Summary

Introduction

Sharing stories is an everyday memory activity common to most humans [1,2]. Of particular interest in the study of aging is how the types of stories that people tell, and how they tell them, changes across the lifespan. Differences in storytelling ability and style have been related to psychosocial and biological changes that accompany aging [3,4]. Prior research investigating story recall has revealed differences in the amount of information that younger and older adults express [14,15] as well as the amount of accurate information produced [16]. The primary goal of the present study was to examine whether age is related to how accurately individuals remember the gist and detail in stories (i.e., non-autobiographical). We examined the role of other personal characteristics, gender and episodic memory ability/education, on recall accuracy

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Discussion

Conclusion