Aging and Recollection: a context story

Although aging is related to decline in recollection as measured by so-called objective measures, older adults’ subjective experience of recollection remains sometimes stable. Such dissociation could suggest that younger and older adults use details with different diagnosticity to make subjective recollection judgments. However, the type of details that are reported as bases for recollective experiences by younger adults can also vary as a function of context. Here, we directly investigated age-related changes in recollection and familiarity in different memorability context. Participants studied one set of words in a medium level of processing (LOP) task, and another set of words with either a shallow or deep LOP task (i.e., low vs. high memorability context, respectively). At test, participants discriminated between old and new words and provided information about the basis of their recollective experiences.
In both age groups, medium items received more recollection judgments in low (vs. high) memorability context. These recollections seem to be associated with internal information (thought, image, emotion). In contrast, external details (list source, appearance, list position) more often accompanied recollection of medium items in high (vs. low) memorability context. We discuss this effect in terms of Gruppuso et al.’s (1997) functional account. Like younger adults, what older adults deem to be an experience of remembering arises from the functional utility of the recollected information for accomplishing the task. In the low (vs. high) memorability context, the information recollected for medium items more easily met the functional definition of remembering established by participants during the test.