Recollective experience in odor recognition: Influences of adult age and familiarity

Abstract

We examined recollective experience in odor memory as a function of age, intention to learn, and familiarity. Young and older adults studied a set of familiar and unfamiliar odors with incidental or intentional encoding instructions. At recognition, participants indicated whether their response was based on explicit recollection (remembering), a feeling of familiarity (knowing), or guessing. The results indicated no age-related differences in the distribution of experiential responses for unfamiliar odors. By contrast, for familiar odors the young demonstrated more explicit recollection than the older adults, who produced more "know" and "guess" responses. Intention to learn was unrelated to recollective experience. In addition, the observed age differences in "remember" responses for familiar odors were eliminated when odor naming was statistically controlled. This suggests that age-related deficits in activating specific odor knowledge (i.e., odor names) play an important role for age differences in recollective experience of olfactory information.

Odor Memory Performance and Memory Awareness: A Comparison to Word Memory Across Orienting Tasks and Retention Intervals

“…Whether an object is identified or not may of course be of potential importance to memory performance and awareness in any modality. In line with previous research (Herz 2003;Bäckman 1997, 1993;Larsson et al 2006;Lyman and McDaniel 1986;Rabin and Cain 1984;Öberg et al 2002), the current study could show that episodic recognition performance as well as recollective experience was clearly aided by an identification of the TBR odor.…”

Understanding How Prior Knowledge Influences Memory in Older Adults

“…Critically, prior knowledge was manipulated through the era of the actors' fame: 1950s or 1990s, with the assumption that older adults would have more knowledge of 1950s actors than younger adults, and vice versa for the 1990s actors. As expected, older adults correctly recognized more names of 1950s actors than did younger adults, but, in an interesting finding, they also ascribed significantly more "remember" judgments (and less "know" judgments) to the 1950s names than did younger adults (for a similar finding using odor stimuli, see Larsson, Oberg, & Bäckman, 2006).…”

A review on the neural bases of episodic odor memory: from laboratory-based to autobiographical approaches

“…Fourth, recognition memory performances can also be affected by the type of procedure engaged in encoding. While no differences emerge for odors learned intentionally or incidentally (Engen and Ross, 1973; Larsson et al, 2003, 2006), the processing task used to encode odor affects the subsequent recognition of odors. Odors are better recognized after elaborative processing (verbal definition, association with a life episode) than after pure odor perceptual processing (Lyman and McDaniel, 1986, 1990).…”

“…The recollective experience is experimentally approached through the Remember/Know procedure (Tulving, 1985) in order to determine how much recollection and familiarity contribute to different kinds of recognition. The recollective experience occurring in odor recognition memory is influenced by several factors: odor familiarity and identifiability, and gender (Larsson et al, 2003, 2006; Olsson et al, 2009). For instance, Larsson et al (2006) showed that recognition is more based on recollection than familiarity for familiar odors, and is more based on familiarity and guessing than on recollection for unfamiliar odors.…”