In Here and Out There: Evidence That Age-Related Differences in Memory Specificity are Attenuated in Natural Social Conversations

Relative to younger adults, older adults describe autobiographical event memories using less episodic detail. This outcome, although robust and highly replicated, is based on studies conducted in experimental contexts that use unfamiliar, impersonal structured interviews – a context that may place older adults at an episodic specificity disadvantage. The present preregistered study compared how young adults (N = 24) and cognitively normal older adults (N = 50) narrate autobiographical event memories in an experimental context, and as they went about their daily lives, using a smartphone application that unobtrusively captured their natural conversations. We also examined a standard neuropsychological test of learning and memory for comparison. Findings revealed a significant context by age group interaction for autobiographical memory episodic specificity. Although older adults recalled less episodic detail in the experimental context, older adults’ episodic detail was significantly higher than young adults in event memory narratives captured in their natural conversations. In fact, the specificity of these naturally shared event memories did not significantly differ between young and older adults. We found a similar outcome when we zoomed out and examined overall autobiographical thought specificity in natural daily conversations. These findings, along with additional analyzes examining how well experimental measures of autobiographical and neuropsychological functioning predict everyday autobiographical thinking, suggest that even though experimental tasks may provide some insight into how autobiographical event memories and thoughts are shared in daily conversation, they nonetheless underestimate older adults’ natural episodic specificity.