Older and younger adults' hindsight bias after positive and negative outcomes

After learning about facts or outcomes of events, people overestimate in hindsight what they knew in foresight. Prior research has shown that this hindsight bias is more pronounced in older than in younger adults. However, this robust finding is based primarily on a specific paradigm that requires generating and recalling numerical judgments to general knowledge questions that deal with emotionally neutral content. As older and younger adults tend to process positive and negative information differently, they might also show differences in hindsight bias after positive and negative outcomes. Furthermore, hindsight bias can manifest itself as a bias in memory for prior given judgments, but also as retrospective impressions of inevitability and foreseeability. Currently, there is no research on age differences in all three manifestations of hindsight bias. In this study, younger (N = 46, 18–30 years) and older adults (N = 45, 64–90 years) listened to everyday-life scenarios that ended positively or negatively, recalled the expectation they previously held about the outcome (to measure the memory component of hindsight bias), and rated each outcome’s foreseeability and inevitability. Compared with younger adults, older adults recalled their prior expectations as closer to the actual outcomes (i.e., they showed a larger memory component of hindsight bias), and this age difference was more pronounced for negative than for positive outcomes. Inevitability and foreseeability impressions, however, did not differ between the age groups. Thus, there are age differences in hindsight bias after positive and negative outcomes, but only with regard to memory for prior judgments. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13421-021-01195-w

Modulating prospective memory and attentional control with high-definition transcranial current stimulation: Study protocol of a randomized, double-blind, and sham-controlled trial in healthy older adults.

The ability to remember future intentions (i.e., prospective memory) is influenced by attentional control. At the neuronal level, frontal and parietal brain regions have been related to attentional control and prospective memory. It is debated, however, whether more or less activity in these regions is beneficial for older adults' performance. We will test that by systematically enhancing or inhibiting activity in these regions with anodal or cathodal high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation in older adults. We will include n = 105 healthy older volunteers (60-75 years of age) in a randomized, double-blind, sham-controlled, and parallel-group design. The participants will receive either cathodal, anodal, or sham high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation of the left or right inferior frontal gyrus, or the right superior parietal gyrus (1mA for 20 min). During and after stimulation, the participants will complete tasks of attentional control and prospective memory. The results of this study will clarify how frontal and parietal brain regions contribute to attentional control and prospective memory in older healthy adults. In addition, we will elucidate the relationship between attentional control and prospective memory in that age group. The study has been registered with ClinicalTrials.gov on the 12th of May 2021 (trial identifier: NCT04882527)

The Development of Clustering in Episodic Memory: A Cognitive‐Modeling Approach

Younger children's free recall from episodic memory is typically less organized than recall by older children. To investigate if and how repeated learning opportunities help children use organizational strategies that improve recall, the authors analyzed category clustering across four study-test cycles. Seven-year-olds, 10-year-olds, and young adults (N = 150) studied categorically related words for a free-recall task. The cognitive processes underlying recall and clustering were measured with a multinomial model. The modeling revealed that developmental differences emerged particularly in the rate of learning to encode words as categorical clusters. The learning curves showed a common pattern across age groups, indicating developmental invariance. Memory for individual items also contributed to developmental differences and was the only factor driving 7-year-olds' moderate improvements in recall

Hierarchical multinomial modeling to explain individual differences in children’s clustering in free recall

The measurement of individual differences in cognitive processes and the advancement of multinomial processing tree (MPT) models were two of William H. Batchelder’s major research interests. Inspired by his work, we investigated developmental differences between 7-year-old children, 10-year-old children, and young adults, in free recall with the pair-clustering model by Batchelder and Riefer (1980, 1986). Specifically, we examined individual differences (in initial levels and in change across multiple study–test trials) in cluster encoding, retrieval, and covariation with three basic cognitive abilities: semantic verbal understanding, short-term memory capacity, information-processing speed. Data from two developmental studies in which 228 participants freely recalled clusterable words in four study–test cycles were used for reanalysis. We combined two model extensions not linked so far (Klauer, 2010; Knapp & Batchelder, 2004). This novel combination of modeling methods made it possible to analyze the relation between individual cognitive abilities and changes in cluster encoding and retrieval across study–test cycles. Inspired by William H. Batchelder, this work illustrates how MPT modeling can contribute to the understanding of cognitive development