Subjective remembering experience in aging: Disconnection between vividness ratings and objective recollection

Recollection allows humans to retrieve specific details about past events (objective recollection) and to have the subjective feeling of re-experiencing these events (subjective recollection). Healthy aging affects episodic memory, with consensual difficulty in objective recollection. Notably, older adults recall fewer episodic details than young adults when remembering past episodes. Some studies reported however that older adults judge their memories as being very vivid or claim high confidence in their memory. This would indicate intact subjective recollection. Our research aims at demonstrating whether there is an objective-subjective disconnection in recollection during aging. Using a lab-based and a lifelogging approach, we performed multilevel regression models to assess whether objective recollection performance predicts subjective recollection experience for the same trials in young and older participants. We observed that older adults’ ratings of having vivid memories for past events do not rely as much on the actual number of episodic details they retrieve as in young participants. We conducted also a neuroimaging (fMRI) study to examine the neural basis of highly vivid memories in young and older participants. This work can inform us about how humans generate the subjective experience of remembering.