Story asides as a useful construct in examining adults’ story recall.

Abstract

Older adults sometimes exhibit higher levels of off-target verbosity during story recall than do young adults. This appears as the inclusion of extraneous information not directly relevant to the topic. Some production of such material has been clearly related to cognitive decline, particularly older adults’ inability to inhibit production of irrelevant information. In tandem, however, research also suggests that some extraneous information is indirectly related to the topic and may reflect age differences in communicative styles. To further elucidate the social cognitive aspect of this issue, the question of import is: What is the content of the additional information provided by participants during story recall? The present study answers this question. Grounded in the autobiographical memory and life story literatures, we introduce the construct, story asides, and a reliable content-analytic scheme for its assessment. Young and older adults (N = 129) recalled one of two types of stories: a personal autobiographical memory or an experimenter-generated fictional story. Narratives were reliably coded for story asides. As expected, older adults produced more story asides than young adults only for autobiographical stories. The discussion focuses on the role of story asides in everyday communication including the possibility that they may be a sign of communicative expertise.

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

“…This finding, which is consistent with prior studies, highlights the degree to which older adults rely on semantic memory for autobiographical retrieval. Recently, there has been increased interest in understanding the extent to which accumulation of knowledge and a shift in narrative style with cognitive aging may influence "default modes of thinking" (Andrews-Hanna et al, in press;Bluck et al, 2016;Madore & Schacter, 2014;Spreng et al, 2018). Prior research has shown that during event construction, older adults may have a preference for the use of knowledge and a narrative style that can be broadly described as based on meaning, regardless of whether those events are past-or future-oriented, or are atemporal descriptions of a depicted scene or event (James et al, 1998;Gaesser et al, 2011).…”

“…Prior research has shown that during event construction, older adults may have a preference for the use of knowledge and a narrative style that can be broadly described as based on meaning, regardless of whether those events are past-or future-oriented, or are atemporal descriptions of a depicted scene or event (James et al, 1998;Gaesser et al, 2011). Prior work showing that brief injections of relevant "story asides" are a more common feature among the personal narratives of older adults relative to young adults also can be taken as evidence for an alteration in narrative style (Bluck et al, 2016). We interpret our findings as evidence that age-related accumulation of knowledge and shift in narrative style, while potentially disruptive for episodic remembering, could be viewed as constructive for other types of story-telling, including describing lifetime periods.…”

Dignity therapy intervention fidelity: a cross-sectional descriptive study with older adult outpatients with cancer

“…This focus includes those conducting the interviews, those providing guidance and mentoring, and those evaluating for intervention adherence. Code book definitions must include factors such as the frequency and extent to which categories are evident to participating parties in the communication [ 30 ]. Categories should be mutually exclusive to avoid confusion between categories and the code book should provide very specific instructions [ 30 ].…”

Classification of general and personal semantic details in the Autobiographical Interview

“…Details concerning general semantics and thus public (objective) factual knowledge were generally infrequent, likely owing to the instructions to focus on specific personal episodes, although this category of details was elevated in older compared to younger adults. Providing such contextual details about public events taking place at the same time as the main event could serve to embellish the narratives, especially in older adults that have been shown to provide more "story asides" (Bluck, Alea, Baron-Lee, & Davis, 2016; see also Devitt, Addis, & Schacter, 2017).…”