Age differences in cue utilization during prospective and retrospective memory monitoring.

Abstract

Memory monitoring is an inferential process that we use to evaluate and make judgments about the contents of our memory. Prior work has shown age-related similarity in prospective monitoring of ongoing memory processes, but age-related deficits when retrospectively monitoring the source of memories. In the current study, we examined how extrinsic and intrinsic cues influence age differences in these two forms of memory monitoring. Two experiments were conducted in which young and older adults made prospective judgments of learning (JOLs) to monitor ongoing memory processes as well as retrospective source judgments during retrieval. The emotional valence of words (positive, negative, and neutral) served as an intrinsic cue across experiments. Extrinsic importance cues were manipulated via item-based directed forgetting cues (to-be-remembered versus to-be-forgotten cues) in Experiment 1 and value-based cues (+10 versus −10 cues) in Experiment 2. Results provide novel evidence for age-related similarity in use of extrinsic and intrinsic cues during prospective memory monitoring via JOLs. By contrast, during retrospective source monitoring, older but not young adults showed a bias to attribute positive items to extrinsic cues with higher importance, even when those attributions were inaccurate. These findings suggest that the age-related tendency to favor positive information may lead to systematic errors in retrospective monitoring, which has implications for the credibility of older adults’ source judgments when monitoring memory for emotional events.

The Effects of emotion on judgments of learning and memory: a meta-analytic review

“…For instance, Nomi et al (2013) found no difference in JOLs for faces with positive or negative expressions. Consistent with Nomi et al's (2013) findings, other studies found no statistically detectable difference using other types of learning materials, such as word lists (Gallant et al, 2019), word pairs (Zimmerman & Kelley, 2010) and images (Witherby, 2019).…”

Reward motivation more consistently modulates memory for younger compared to older adults in a directed forgetting task.

“…At least for younger adults, this was in line with our hypothesis and replicates our prior work (Bowen, Gallant, et al, 2020) as memory was enhanced by the high-value reward cue, regardless of the subsequent memory instructions. The fact that older adults did not show this same pattern was unexpected as many studies in the literature have indicated that older adults are able to encode and remember high-value information better than low-value across a variety of experimental paradigms (Bowen, Ford, et al, 2020; Castel et al, 2002; Cohen et al, 2014; Gallant et al, 2019; Hennessee et al, 2017; Mather & Schoeke, 2011; Spaniol et al, 2014) including our prior directed forgetting studies (Bowen, Gallant, et al, 2020). Importantly, age did not moderate overall memory sensitivity or the false alarm rate, indicating that response bias is likely not driving the pattern of memory results.…”

Research thematic and emerging trends of contextual cues: a bibliometrics and visualization approach

“…Amid matching cues, consumers can automatically connect memory units for cognition and feedback. In addition, prospective memory (Gonzalez and Buchanan, 2019), retrospective memory (Bays and Taylor, 2018), implementation intentions (Liu et al , 2018), cue utilization (Gallant et al , 2019) and other theories closely correlate with contextual cues theory. In a highly interconnected business intelligence society, the richness and complexity of contextual cues affect the user experience of automation for sales, marketing, and service.…”