Beyond episodic remembering: elaborative retrieval of lifetime periods in young and older adults

Abstract

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.

Autobiographical memory unknown: Pervasive autobiographical memory loss encompassing personality trait knowledge in an individual with medial temporal lobe amnesia

“…Specifically, we used the standard "internal" or episodic detail categories and the standard "external" detail categories, which include semantic details, other language features (e.g., meta-comments and editorializing), repetitions, and narration of events unrelated to the target autobiographical memory. We further divided personal semantic details into experience-near and experience-far facts, according to a recently established scoring protocol (Acevedo-Molina et al, 2020).…”

Effects of familiar music exposure on deliberate retrieval of remote episodic and semantic memories in healthy aging adults

“…Events are split into three distinct time periods to ensure that participants retrieve memories from a distribution of times early in life, rather than just one span of a few years. We will not include any events occurring later in life to ensure that all probed memories are of remote events (Acevedo-Molina et al, 2020;St. Jacques & Levine, 2007).…”

Searching for the past: Exploring the dynamics of direct and generative autobiographical memory reconstruction among young and cognitively normal older adults

“…The time frame for young adults overlaps with the reminiscence bump, whereas older adults are decades removed from those self-defining, specific memories. That said, studies examining episodic specificity of elaboration using the AI (Levine et al, 2002) do not necessarily find that memories from the reminiscence bump are more detailed, and memories from the last few years still show age effects (Acevedo-Molina et al, 2020;Levine et al, 2002). Nonetheless, similar to prior research, we cannot rule out that older adults tend to select EAMs that were inherently less specific to begin with, regardless of time period.…”