Effects of Aging on General and Specific Memory for Impressions

Abstract

Despite the number of documented declines in memory with age, memory for socioemotional information can be preserved into older adulthood. These studies assessed whether memory for character information could be preserved with age, and how the general versus specific nature of the information tested affected outcomes. We hypothesized that memory for general impressions would be preserved with age, but that memory for specific details would be impaired. In two experiments, younger and older adults learned character information about individuals characterized as positive, neutral, or negative. Participants then retrieved general impressions and specific information for each individual. The testing conditions in Experiment 2 discouraged deliberate recall. In Experiment 1, we found that younger performed better than older adults on both general and specific memory measures. Although age differences in memory for specific information persisted in Experiment 2, we found that younger and older adults remembered general impressions to a similar extent when testing conditions encouraged the use of "gut impressions" rather than deliberate retrieval from memory. We conclude that aging affects memory for specific character information, but memory for general impressions can be age-equivalent. Furthermore, there is no evidence for a positivity bias or differences in the effects of valence on memory across the age groups.

Keywords: aging; emotional memory; memory; person memory; social memory.

Figure 1:

Example stimulus consisting of a face, name, and sentence indicating positive behavior. Actual stimuli were presented in color.

Figure 2:

In Experiment 1, average kappa-corrected general memory scores (+SE) were higher for younger than older adults. Scores were higher for negative stimuli compared to positive, which were higher than neutral stimuli.

Figure 3:

Specific memory scores for Experiment 1 are higher for younger than older adults, with a trend towards older adults performing worse on neutral than positive trials, whereas younger adults did not differ across conditions. The graph depicts average performance (+SE) on the specific memory task.

Figure 4:

In Experiment 2, younger and older adults remembered general impressions equivalently, whereas young adults remembered more specific character information than older adults. The graph depicts average performance (+SE) on general and specific memory tasks, collapsed across valences.