Does a new assessment paradigm exploring everyday memories better reflect subjective memory complaints?

Self-assessment of memory functioning often weakly correlates with memory performances obtained with traditional memory assessments (Beaudoin & Desrichard, 2011), resulting in some people with subjective memory complaints performing within the norm on these tasks. This could be explained by the gap between what involves everyday memory functioning and what requests usual evaluation paradigms. In this study, the link between self-evaluation and objective memory performance was explored, but this time with a task involving the recall of daily events.
Twenty adults having subjective memory complaints were matched with twenty others with no complaints (Mage = 35.27; SDage = 14.49). Five times a day 7 days long, they received notifications on a mobile app asking them to answer questions about their current activity. Two days after the last notification, they were asked to verbally recount 5 of these past activities in as much detail as possible. The richness, specificity, accuracy, and phenomenology of these everyday memories were assessed. Participants also performed 3 subtests of the Wechsler Clinical Memory Scale (WMS-IV; Wechsler, 2009) and completed the Multifactorial Memory Questionnaire (Troyer & Rich, 2002).
T-tests confirmed that the two groups differed on the self-assessment of memory functioning questionnaire (t = -3;22; p = .003). They also differed on the accuracy score of the daily events recall task, with the group with no complaint reporting more accurate information about the events interviewed (U = 119.5; p = .03). However, none of the WMS indices showed any significant difference between the two groups of participants.
These results demonstrate the increased sensitivity of this new daily events recall task to subjective memory complaints compared with a widely validated memory task, underlying the importance of using a more comprehensive exploration of everyday memory functioning in our evaluations. Future work will determine whether this feasibility and sensitivity are replicated in clinical populations.