The impact of age on the temporal compression of daily life events in episodic memory.

Abstract

While age differences in episodic memory are well documented, the impact of age on the structure of memories for real-world events has not been investigated in detail. Recent research has shown that the continuous flow of information that constitutes daily life events is compressed in episodic memory, such that the time needed to mentally replay an event is shorter than the actual event duration. To examine whether this process of temporal compression of prior experience in episodic memory is affected by aging, we asked young and older adults to engage in a series of events that simulated daily life activities while their experience was automatically recorded using a wearable camera. Subsequently, participants were asked to mentally replay these events in as much detail as possible and then to verbally report recalled contents and to rate the subjective qualities of their memories. Results revealed that the rates of temporal compression of events during mental replay were similar in young and older adults. In both age groups, rates of temporal compression were predicted by the density of recalled moments of prior experience per unit of time of the actual event duration. Interestingly, however, the number of recalled moments predicted the subjective vividness of memories in young but not in older adults. Taken together, these results suggest that the process of temporal compression of events in episodic memory is unaffected by age but that the subjective experience of memory vividness becomes less tied to recalled moments that represent the unfolding of events.

Slices of the past: how events are temporally compressed in episodic memory

“…It is important to note that the rate of event compression in episodic memory representations is not constant but varies substantially across events. For example, a consistent finding has been that events in which participants perform specific actions (e.g., buying a newspaper) are less compressed than events that only involve spatial navigation (e.g., going from one place to another with no action to perform except walking) (Folville et al, 2020;Jeunehomme et al, 2018Jeunehomme & D'Argembeau, 2019). In fact, the rate of temporal compression of an event in memory (i.e., the time needed to remember an event relative to the actual event duration) is inversely related to the Behavioural and neural evidence suggest that the formation of episodic memory units depends on the segmentation of the continuous stream of experience into events and sub-events (for review, see Radvansky & Zacks, 2017;Zacks, 2020).…”

“…For each event, participants were asked to mentally re-experience everything that happened in as much detail as possible, and the duration of their mental replay was measured. It was found that participants consistently spent less time remembering events compared to the actual event duration: on average, events were replayed about eight times faster than the actual event duration, with substantial variation in compression rates across events (see also Chen et al, 2017;Folville et al, 2020;.…”

“…A question that remains to be investigated in detail is to what extent the temporal compression of events reflects how they are encoded and stored in episodic memory versus how they are reconstructed at retrieval. In previous studies that assessed event compression rates, participants were instructed to recall everything they could in order to mentally re-experience events in as much detail as possible (Folville et al, 2020;Jeunehomme et al, 2018;Jeunehomme & D'Argembeau, 2019, 2020. Thus, the observation of temporal discontinuities in the unfolding of recalled events probably reflects, at least in part, properties of stored representations (although of course differences in the accessibility of representations may also play some role).…”

I remember it like it was yesterday: Age-related changes in the subjective experience of remembering

“…Older adults produced vividness ratings that were higher than young adults when remembering objects in a real-life setting, despite lower performance in remembering the spatio-temporal context of memory encoding (Mazurek et al, 2015). Also, older adults were found to report vividness ratings that were higher than those of young adults when remembering real-life activities (e.g., buying a beverage) while memory performance regarding the unfolding of the activity did not differ between age-groups (Folville, Jeunehomme et al, 2020). Results of that study further revealed that the intensity of memory vividness was predicted by the number of retrieved moments of experience when accomplishing the activity in young but not in older participants (Folville, Jeunehomme et al, 2020).…”

“…Also, older adults were found to report vividness ratings that were higher than those of young adults when remembering real-life activities (e.g., buying a beverage) while memory performance regarding the unfolding of the activity did not differ between age-groups (Folville, Jeunehomme et al, 2020). Results of that study further revealed that the intensity of memory vividness was predicted by the number of retrieved moments of experience when accomplishing the activity in young but not in older participants (Folville, Jeunehomme et al, 2020). Taken together, these findings provide evidence that older adults overestimate the intensity of their subjective vividness ratings and that these ratings seem to be unrelated to the quantity of retrieved memory details relative to those of young adults.…”