Ageing Together: Interdependence in the Memory Compensation Strategies of Long-Married Older Couples

Abstract

People live and age together in social groups. Across a range of outcomes, research has identified interdependence in the cognitive and health trajectories of ageing couples. Various types of memory decline with age and people report using a range of internal and external, social, and material strategies to compensate for these declines. While memory compensation strategies have been widely studied, research so far has focused only on single individuals. We examined interdependence in the memory compensation strategies reported by spouses within 58 older couples. Couples completed the Memory Compensation Questionnaire, as well as an open-ended interview about their memory compensation practices. We found that internal, intra-individual memory compensation strategies were not associated within couples, but external, extra-individual strategies showed interdependence. Individuals’ scores on material/technological compensation strategies were positively correlated with their partners’. Reported reliance on a spouse was higher for men and increased with age. Our open-ended interviews yielded rich insights into the complex and diverse resources that couples use to support memory in day-to-day life. Particularly evident was the extent of interaction and coordination between social and material compensation, such that couples jointly used external compensation resources. Our results suggest that individuals’ reports of their compensation strategies do not tell the whole story. Rather, we propose that older couples show interdependence in their memory compensation strategies, and adopt complex systems of integrated material and social memory compensation in their day-to-day lives.

‘I Remember Where the Galaxies Are and You Remember Where the Stocks Are’: Older Couples’ Descriptions of Transactive Memory Systems in Everyday Life

“…We found that the division of mnemonic responsibility among couples frequently conformed to overarching gendered norms, such as women taking greater responsibility for social scheduling, while men were more likely to oversee paying bills. Moreover, as previously reported in Harris, Sutton et al (2022), women in this cohort were more likely to manage external resources such as calendars, while men more frequently reported vicarious benefit or reliance on their wives. In particular, we found evidence supporting previous findings that women in female-male partnerships tend to take on greater responsibility for mnemonic labour that has communal (rather than individual) benefit than do their male counterparts (Moulton-Tetlock et al, 2019).…”

“…All participants completed a range of individual and collaborative memory tasks across two sessions as part of a broader program of research, including word list recall, personal information, autobiographical memory, and a series of questionnaires and neuropsychological measures. The findings from these measures are reported elsewhere Grysman et al, 2020;Harris et al, 2019;Harris, Sutton et al, 2022). At the conclusion of the second experimental session (one week after the first), we conducted the memory practices interview (reported in this study) with both members of each couple together.…”

“…The extent to which participants benefitted from their partner's remembering wasn't always as explicit as the examples above, however. While some participants reported that they themselves had little use for external memory resources, it became clear through conversation that they vicariously benefitted from their partner's use of such resources, as they relied on their partner to remind them of upcoming appointments instead of monitoring these themselves (Harris, Sutton et al, 2022). We identified references to vicarious benefit in 31/39 couples, for example: 13F: You do, you depend on me to remind you of all appointments and where we're going, when he's gotta be home, and if we're going out, what time he's gotta be there!…”

“…Vicarious benefit was gendered, such that of the 31 couples who mentioned such benefit, 18 referenced the man benefiting from the woman's efforts, 10 mentioned reciprocal benefits, and 3 mentioned the woman benefiting (see also Harris, Sutton et al, 2022).…”

Remembering in the wild: recontextualising and reconciling studies of media and memory

“…An example is the work of Kath Bicknell, John Sutton, Celia Harris, Amanda Barnier, and others (see Sutton et al 2020; or Bicknell and Sutton's 2022 book on Collaborative Embodied Performance: Ecologies of Skill , for more developed examples from a different field). Building on a research programme spanning more than a decade, which includes collaborative remembering experiments with couples in their homes (Barnier et al 2018; Harris et al 2014, 2018, 2022; Sutton et al 2010), they simultaneously conducted an ethnographic study of two couples as they participated in those experiments. Participant observation, analysis of video footage and semi-structured interviews with these two couples generated insights beyond the experimental data.…”