The Difference between Right and Wrong: Accuracy of Older and Younger Adults’ Story Recall

Abstract

Sharing stories is an important social activity in everyday life. This study used fine-grained content analysis to investigate the accuracy of recall of two central story elements: the gist and detail of socially-relevant stories. Younger (M age = 28.06) and older (M age = 75.03) American men and women (N = 63) recalled fictional stories that were coded for (i) accuracy of overall gist and specific gist categories and (ii) accuracy of overall detail and specific detail categories. Findings showed no age group differences in accuracy of overall gist or detail, but differences emerged for specific categories. Older adults more accurately recalled the gist of when the event occurred whereas younger adults more accurately recalled the gist of why the event occurred. These differences were related to episodic memory ability and education. For accuracy in recalling details, there were some age differences, but gender differences were more robust. Overall, women remembered details of these social stories more accurately than men, particularly time and perceptual details. Women were also more likely to accurately remember the gist of when the event occurred. The discussion focuses on how accurate recall of socially-relevant stories is not clearly age-dependent but is related to person characteristics such as gender and episodic memory ability/education.

Narrative Discourse in Young and Older Adults: Behavioral and NIRS Analyses

“…The older adults managed to maintain equivalent accuracy to the younger group in the macroproposition (gist) condition. Similar results had been reported in the past in studies using longer texts and longer periods between reading and questions (Radvansky et al, 2001 ; Radvansky and Dijkstra, 2007 ; Davis et al, 2015 ). According to those studies, elderly participants perform better and rely more on what the text is about (macrostructure and situation model) than what it is (surface form and micropropositions).…”

“…Aging is known to have an impact on many cognitive functions, some of which, like working memory, are involved in discourse comprehension (Brébion, 2003 ; DeDe et al, 2004 ; Payne and Stine-Morrow, 2017 ). Among other things, elderly participants seem to rely more on the gist of the text and the situation model while performing comprehension tasks, while younger participants rely more on the textbase and microstructure (Radvansky et al, 2001 ; Ferstl, 2006 ; Radvansky and Dijkstra, 2007 ; Magliano et al, 2012 ; Davis et al, 2015 ; Zhuang et al, 2016 ). On the other hand, it seems that the characteristics of a text, especially its semantic load, highly influence the capacities of older adults to recall the microstructure and macrostructure.…”

Age-related differences in conversational discourse abilities A comparative study

“… 72 - 74 While younger adults focus on the text itself and its microstructure, older individuals are more likely to cling to the general idea of the text, suggesting difficulty in understanding nuance and/or specific utterances during a discourse task. 75 , 76 …”

Fact vs. Affect in the Telephone Game: All Levels of Surprise Are Retold With High Accuracy, Even Independently of Facts

“…In order to gather data on the transmission of factual content, we coded the original stories for details; 20–24 for each story variation (for studies that have used similar detail codings, see Davis et al, 2015 ; Moussaïd et al, 2015 ). After the retellings, experts counted the number of coded details present in all third-iteration retellings including for example, basic actions such as “Sarah apologizes,” verbal constructions such as “studied all night,” or descriptions such as “stern but knowledgeable professor”, also accepting non-verbatim detail representation such as “says sorry,” “worked hard,” or “strict professor.”…”