GIGA-CRC In Vivo Imaging, Allée du 6 août, 8, Quartier Agora, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium.
Department of Psychology, Psychology and Neuroscience of Cognition Research Unit, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2022 Aug;29(4):1223-1245. doi: 10.3758/s13423-021-02048-y. Epub 2021 Dec 16.
It has been frequently described that older adults subjectively report the vividness of their memories as being as high, or even higher, than young adults, despite poorer objective memory performance. Here, we review studies that examined age-related differences in the subjective experience of memory vividness. By examining vividness calibration and resolution, studies using different types of approaches converge to suggest that older adults overestimate the intensity of their vividness ratings relative to young adults, and that they rely on retrieved memory details to a lesser extent to judge vividness. We discuss potential mechanisms underlying these observations. Inflation of memory vividness with regard to the richness of memory content may stem from age-differences in vividness criterion or scale interpretation and psycho-social factors. The reduced reliance on episodic memory details in older adults may stem from age-related differences in how they monitor these details to make their vividness ratings. Considered together, these findings emphasize the importance of examining age-differences in memory vividness using different analytical methods and they provide valuable evidence that the subjective experience of remembering is more than the reactivation of memory content. In this vein, we recommend that future studies explore the links between memory vividness and other subjective memory scales (e.g., ratings of details or memory confidence) in healthy aging and/or other populations, as it could be used as a window to better characterize the cognitive processes that underpin the subjective assessment of the quality of recollected events.
人们经常描述老年人主观上报告的记忆生动性与年轻人一样高，甚至更高，尽管他们的客观记忆表现较差。在这里，我们回顾了研究年龄相关的记忆生动性主观体验差异的研究。通过检查生动性校准和分辨率，使用不同类型方法的研究得出结论，认为老年人相对于年轻人高估了他们的生动性评分的强度，并且他们在判断生动性时较少依赖于检索到的记忆细节。我们讨论了这些观察结果背后的潜在机制。关于记忆内容丰富度的记忆生动性的膨胀可能源于生动性标准或量表解释以及心理社会因素的年龄差异。老年人对情节记忆细节的依赖程度降低可能源于他们监测这些细节以进行生动性评分的方式的年龄差异。综上所述，这些发现强调了使用不同分析方法研究记忆生动性的年龄差异的重要性，并为记忆体验不仅仅是记忆内容的重新激活这一观点提供了有价值的证据。为此，我们建议未来的研究在健康老龄化和/或其他人群中探索记忆生动性与其他主观记忆量表（例如，细节评分或记忆信心）之间的联系，因为它可以作为一个窗口来更好地描述支持回忆事件质量的主观评估的认知过程。
