Age-Related Changes In the Episodic Simulation of Future Events

Psychology and aging, 2010

Consciousness and cognition, 2014

We investigated the episodic/semantic distinction in remembering the past and imagining the future and explored cognitive mechanisms predicting events' specificity throughout the lifespan. Eighty-three 6- to 81-year-old participants, divided into 5 age groups, underwent past, present and future episodic (events' evocation) and semantic (self-descriptions) autobiographical tasks and a complementary cognitive test battery (executive functions, working and episodic memory). The main results showed age effects on episodic events' evocation indicating an inverted U function (i.e., developmental progression from 6 to 21years and aging decline). By contrast, age effects were slighter on self-descriptions while self-defining events' evocation increased with age. Furthermore, age effects on episodic events' evocation were mainly mediated by age effects on cognitive functions and personal semantics. These new findings indicate a developmental and aging episodic/semantic di...

2010

Experimental Psychology (formerly Zeitschrift für Experimentelle Psychologie), 2010

Human beings' ability to envisage the future has been recently assumed to rely on the reconstructive nature of episodic memory . In the present research, young adults mentally reexperienced and preexperienced temporally close and distant autobiographical episodes, and rated their phenomenal characteristics as well as their novelty. Additionally, they performed a delayed recognition task including remember-know judgments on new, old-remember, and old-imagine words. Results showed that past and future temporally close episodes included more phenomenal details than distant episodes, in line with earlier studies. However, future events were occasionally rated as already occurred in the past. Furthermore, in the recognition task, participants falsely attributed old-imagine words to remembered episodes. While partially in line with previous results, these findings call for a more subtle analysis in order to discriminate representations of past episodes from true future events simulations.

Memory, 2019

Relative to young adults, cognitively normal older adults commonly generate more semantic details and fewer episodic details in their descriptions of unique life events. It remains unclear whether this reflects a specific change to episodic memory or a broader alteration to autobiographical narration. To explore age differences across different types of autobiographical narration, we created a lifetime period narrative task that involves describing extended events. For comparison, participants also described unique life events. All autobiographical narratives were scored for episodic, semantic, and other detail generation. Relative to young adults, older adults generated more detailed narratives for remote and recent lifetime periods, which was driven by their increased retrieval of personal and general semantic details. Older adults also generated more semantic details for unique life event narratives, along with reduced episodic detail. More broadly, in both groups lifetime period narratives were largely based on semantic details, whereas episodic details were more prominent in the descriptions of unique life events. These findings indicate that the elevated generation of semantic details associated with normal cognitive aging is reflected in multiple types of autobiographical narration. We suggest that lifetime period narration is a spared aspect of autobiographical memory among older adults.

Older adults are more likely than younger adults to confuse real and imagined events in episodic memory. This deficit may be attributed to a reduction in the specific features available for recollection (i.e., retrieval success) or to a deficit in the search and decision processes operating during recollection attempts (i.e., retrieval monitoring). The present experiments used a two-phase event-generation task to manipulate retrieval success and test for age-related deficits in retrieval monitoring. In the first phase, participants generated real autobiographical events from their past and imagined plausible future events in response to cue words. We used elaboration instructions to experimentally manipulate the amount of features associated with these generated events. In the second phase administered 24 hours later, we gave recollection tests that required participants to discriminate between these previously generated past and future events in memory. As predicted, the elaboration manipulation increased the amount of features that could be recollected in association with the generated events in both age groups (including cognitive operations in Experiment 1 and perceptual details in Experiment 2). However, older adults were more likely than younger adults to confuse past and future events in memory, and critically, elaboration did not minimize these age-related confusions. These findings imply that aging impairs the ability to accurately monitor retrieval for features that are characteristic of autobiographical events, above and beyond age-related impairments in the retrieval of the recollected information itself.

There are differences in the ways in which younger and older adults remember the past and imagine the future. However, little research has examined this finding in relation to the self. Older and younger adults described current and future self-images and generated associated memories and future events. Age differences in the generation of past and future events were paralleled in self-images: Older adults' future self-images were closer to the present, whereas their current self-images were formed longer ago. Both groups' memories and future events clustered temporally around times of self-image formation. We propose that the self governs event construction in both younger and older adults, and discuss the role of self-related processing in imagining the future and remembering the past.

Psychology and Aging, 2002

Cognitive aging research documents reduced access to contextually specific episodic details in older adults, whereas access to semantic or other nonepisodic information is preserved or facilitated. The present study extended this finding to autobiographical memory by using a new measure; the Autobiographical Interview. Younger and older adults recalled events from 5 life periods. Protocols were scored according to a reliable system for categorizing episodic and nonepisodic information. Whereas younger adults were biased toward episodic details reflecting happenings, locations, perceptions, and thoughts, older adults favored semantic details not connected to a particular time and place. This pattern persisted after additional structured probing for contextual details. The Autobiographical Interview is a useful instrument for quantifying episodic and semantic contributions to personal remote memory. for scoring the reliability memories; and Margaret McKinnon for comments on drafts of the manuscript. We thank Fergus Craik for his guidance at all stages of this project.

SAGE Open, 2016

This study examined the role of aging in the recall and recognition of autobiographical memories. Young and older adults submitted personal events during a period of three months to an Internet diary. After this period, they performed a cued-recall test based on what, who, and where retrieval cues. Three months later, participants completed a recognition test in which the descriptions of half the entries were altered. The results indicated no age differences on the cued-recall task, but several age differences on the recognition task. Older adults were more susceptible to accept altered entries as authentic, particularly when these changes had been subtle. However, despite their lower performance, older adults were more confident with the accuracy of their decisions. The results suggest that different mechanisms underlie the recall and recognition of autobiographical memories and that only tasks that subtly tap into source monitoring abilities are affected by cognitive aging processes.

Consciousness and cognition, 2017

Although extant evidence suggests that many neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying episodic past, future, and counterfactual thinking overlap, recent results have uncovered differences among these three processes. However, the extent to which there may be age-related differences in the phenomenological characteristics associated with episodic past, future and counterfactual thinking remains unclear. This study used adapted versions of the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire and the Autobiographical Interview in younger and older adults to investigate the subjective experience of episodic past, future and counterfactual thinking. The results suggest that, across all conditions, younger adults generated more internal details than older adults. However, older adults generated more external details for episodic future and counterfactual thinking than younger adults. Additionally, younger and older adults generated more internal details, and gave higher sensory and contextual rating...