Adult Age Differences in Specific and Gist Associative Episodic Memory Across Short- and Long-Term Retention Intervals

Public Significance Statement Adult aging is associated with a loss of memory for specific details of past experiences, yet little is known about how quickly older adults forget specific representations in episodic memory. The present study shows that older adults exhibit some losses in the ability to remember specific details of past episodes almost immediately after encountering those episodes. At the same time, given the right retrieval cues in short-term memory, older adults can successfully remember some specific details of a recently encoded episode as well as younger adults. Moreover, older adults can successfully remember past episodes at gist levels of representation in both short- and long-term memory. Age-related deficits in associative episodic memory have been widely reported, but recent research suggests that some of these deficits occur for highly specific but not gist representations. It remains undetermined whether older adults' deficits in specific associative episodic memory, observed in long-term memory, are also present in short-term memory. We used a continuous associative recognition task to address this question. Fifty young and 50 older adults studied face-scene pairs, with memory tests occurring in both short-term and long-term memory. Memory tests featured intact (old) pairs, related (similar) pairs, and unrelated (dissimilar) pairs. On short-term memory tests, older adults were less accurate in classifying related pairs, which was manifest by age-related reductions in the probability of retrieving specific memory to engage in recollection rejection. However, older adults were capable of remembering specific details in short-term memory for intact probes but were less likely to remember specific details in long-term memory. Finally, older adults were always as capable as younger adults of remembering gist details. Results suggest that older adults do at least partially encode specific representations in short-term memory, and their access to these specific representations is cue dependent-they can do so when there is a large correspondence between encoding and retrieval conditions but are less likely to engage in deeper elaboration at retrieval. This limits their ability to remember specific details of associations to suppress false recognitions in short-term memory and to engage in veridical recognition in long-term memory.