These findings show that elderly individuals benefit from the memory-enhancing effects of curiosity. This may lead to the implementation of learning strategies that target and stimulate curiosity in aging.

Background/Study Context: Recent studies have shown that young adults better remember factual information they are curious about. It is not entirely clear, however, whether this effect is retained during aging. Here, we investigated curiosity-driven memory benefits in young and elderly individuals. Methods: In two experiments, young (age range 18-26) and older (age range 65-89) adults read trivia questions, and rated their curiosity to find out the answer. They also attended to task-irrelevant faces presented between the trivia question and the answer. We then administered a surprise memory test to assess recall accuracy for trivia answers, and recognition memory performance for the incidentally-learned faces.Results: In both young and elderly adults, recall performance was higher for answers to questions that elicited high levels of curiosity. In Experiment 1 we also found that faces presented in temporal proximity to curiosity-eliciting trivia questions were better recognized, indicating that the beneficial effects of curiosity extended to the encoding of task-irrelevant material. Conclusions: These findings show that elderly individuals benefit from the memory-enhancing effects of curiosity. This may lead to the implementation of learning strategies that target and stimulate curiosity in aging.

Temporal binding refers to the subjective temporal compression between actions and their outcomes. It is widely used as an implicit measure of sense of agency, that is, the experience of controlling our actions and their consequences. One of the most common measures of temporal binding is the paradigm developed by Haggard, Clark and Kalogeras (2002) based on the Libet clock stimulus. Although widely used, it is not clear how sensitive the temporal binding effect is to the parameters of the clock stimulus. Here, we present five experiments examining the effects of clock speed, number of clock markings and length of the clock hand on binding. Our results show that the magnitude of temporal binding increases with faster clock speeds, whereas clock markings and clock hand length do not significantly influence temporal binding. We discuss the implications of these results.

W judgments are a widely used intention timing awareness estimate. These judgments are typically obtained by using the classic Libet-style paradigm whereby participants are asked to estimate the time they become aware of their intention to act by using the location of a rotating object on a clock face. There is an inconsistency in the Libet clock parameters used in previous studies, and it is unclear whether this variability impacts W judgments and other outcome measures, with implications for the construct validity of this measure and the generalisability of results across studies. Here, we present a four-experiment study that systematically manipulated the Libet clock speed, number of clock markings, length of the clock hand and type of clock radius in order to examine whether these parameter manipulations affect intention timing awareness estimates. Our results demonstrate W judgments can be significantly influenced by the clock speed and number of clock markings. The meaning and implications of these results are discussed.