A novel scoring protocol reveals age-related differences in abstract compared to concrete thinking in cued autobiographical remembering

Abstract

Human imagination has garnered growing interest in many fields. However, how to characterize different forms of imaginative thinking and how this differs between young and older adults remains unclear. Here, we introduce a novel scoring protocol based on our recently proposed neurocognitive framework of imagination to provide a broad tool with which to characterize imaginative thinking. The scoring protocol distinguishes between concrete/perceptual forms of imagination termed the “mind’s eye” and abstract/reflective forms of imagination termed the “mind’s mind.” Moreover, the protocol captures whether thoughts pertain to the self, others, or both. We applied this scoring protocol with high inter-rater reliability across two studies involving distinct participants and narrative-based imagination tasks. When compared to young adults, older adults showed a bias toward the mind’s mind form of thinking while orally remembering past events (Study 1). However, the use of mind’s mind was largely stable in a separate memory and future thinking task in only older adults (Study 2). Across both studies, older adults had less self-referential thoughts. Taken together, these results reveal that imaginative thinking can be characterized within the mind’s eye and mind’s mind framework, with implications for understanding these two forms of imagination in cognitively normal older age.