Older adults do not always rely on the amount of episodic details when considering the subjective vividness of their memories

Abstract

Although healthy aging has been related to a decline in recollection as indexed by objective measures (e.g., source memory or free-recall), the subjective experience of recollection (e.g., vividness of memory) seems to remain stable. To date, however, behavioral studies have only examined these agerelated effects using aggregated data across trials, such that the relationship between subjective and objective measures of recollection on a trial-by-trial basis remains unknown. In this study, we conducted two experiments in which young and older adults performed a cued recollection task with pictures associated with descriptive labels at encoding. At retrieval, participants were cued with the labels and were asked to rate the vividness of their memory of the associated picture and to recall as many details of the picture as they could. In Experiment 1, multilevel analyses revealed that, across trials, the relationship between subjective (global vividness) and objective (free recall) recollection was greater in young than in older participants. Experiment 2’s results replicated and extended this finding by showing that, when requested to rate the vividness of more specific memory dimensions (e.g., persons and objects), older adults still did not calibrate their subjective judgements on the amount of retrieved episodic details to the same extent as young adults. These results provide direct evidence that, compared to young individuals, older adults rely to a lesser extent on the amount of retrieved episodic details to judge their subjective experiences while remembering