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Age differences in the mechanisms underlying remembering events vividly and confidently
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Description: The way humans remember events changes across the lifespan. Older adults rely to a greater extent on gist rather than perceptual detail for episodic memory judgements. Additionally, older adults subjectively rate their memory’s vividness as greater or equally high as young adults despite poorer performance on episodic memory tasks. This study aims to explore how the content and specificity (semantic gist versus perceptual detail) of event memories relate to the subjective experience of memory vividness and memory confidence, and how this relationship is affected by healthy ageing. 100 healthy older adults and 100 young adults will be tested online, using an adapted version of a paradigm developed by Cooper and Ritchey (2022). At encoding, participants will be asked to generate a distinctive story in order associate together (1) a theme word, (2) a person, (3) a place, and (4) an object, to create unique events. Immediately afterwards, participants will be tested on their memory for the identities of the event components (indexing semantic gist), and on a lure discrimination task (indexing memory for perceptual details). The performance on the memory tasks will then be used to explore the relationship between episodic specificity and content and subjective memory measures, obtained via continuous subjective ratings of vividness and confidence at memory test. This research will contribute to the limited body of evidence exploring the relationship between subjective and objective attributes of episodic memory across the lifespan. References: Cooper, R.A., Ritchey, M. (2022) Patterns of episodic content and specificity predicting subjective memory vividness. Memory & Cognition, 50, 1629–1643.