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

Although healthy aging is related to a decline in recollection asindexed by objective measures, the subjective experience of recollection remains stable.To date, however, studies have only examined these age-related 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. To address this question, young and older adults performed a cued recollection task of pictures that wereassociated 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 picture and to recall as many details of the picture as they could.Multilevelanalyses revealed that, across trials, the relationship between subjective (vividness) and objective (free recall) recollection was stronger in young than inolder participants.However, when requested to recall the content of the picture before assessing vividness, older adults calibrated their subjective judgements on the amount of retrieved details to the same extent as young adults. These results provide evidence that older adults not only retrieve fewer episodic details but also rely on these details to a lesser extent than young adults for judging the subjective quality of their memories.