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A new study published in Psychology and Aging indicates that having to switch between recalling different types of personal memories makes it harder for both young and older adults to follow instructions accurately. Beyond the mental effort of juggling changing rules, the findings suggest that older adults tend to include more general personal facts and fewer specific details than younger adults, whether they are recalling a one-time event or a recurring routine.
Autobiographical memory is the mental system that allows people to recollect their own life history. It encompasses two main kinds of information: episodic memory and personal semantic memory. Episodic memories are rich recollections of unique events tied to a specific time and place, such as a particular birthday dinner last month. Personal semantic memories are broader facts about one’s life that are not tied to a single episode, such as general self-knowledge. Falling between the two are memories of repeated events, like a weekly habit of cooking with a friend, which summarize many similar occasions while still carrying some sensory and contextual detail.
As people age, the balance between these forms of recall tends to change. A benchmark 2002 study of younger and older adults found that when asked to describe past life events, younger adults mostly shared specific details about what happened, where they were, and how they felt, whereas older adults shared fewer time-and-place details and favored general, factual knowledge.
“A typical example would be that if a young adult is telling you about their last birthday party, they are more likely to include specific contextual and perceptual details (such as the specific time and place, what clothes people wore at that party, or specific details about what they said),” senior author Louis Renoult, a professor of cognitive neuroscience and the postgraduate research director in the School of Psychology at the University of East Anglia, told PsyPost. “In contrast, when remembering the same event, older adults would typically provide more factual background knowledge about similar birthday parties or other celebrations they would have attended, or more general knowledge they have about the people involved, for example.”
This pattern raised questions about whether the shift toward general memories comes from changes in how memories are stored or from age-related declines in executive control, which is the set of mental skills used to manage goals, stay focused, and filter out irrelevant thoughts. A 2013 study explored this by changing how instructions were given while participants listened to musical clips, finding that younger adults adjusted how specific their memories were to match the rules, while older adults did not adjust their recall as much when task demands grew more complex.
To test how mental flexibility affects memory recall, another 2013 study of university students introduced a test requiring participants to rapidly alternate between recalling unique, one-time events and repeated routines. The students were less accurate at providing specific memories when they had to switch back and forth compared to when they followed a single rule at a time.
“In the field, people generally assume that the greater reliance on factual knowledge (and semantic memory) in aging would constitute a compensation, due to a less efficient episodic memory,” explained Renoult, who also recently discussed memory and aging on a podcast episode. “However, tests commonly used to assess semantic and episodic memory are rarely well matched in difficulty, and most tests of autobiographical memory focus on episodic memory only. Due to these issues, my research group has developed new memory tests to study semantic and episodic memory in parallel, in conditions where they are well matched experimentally to better understand memory changes as we get older.”
To examine whether mental switching places an extra burden on older adults during memory recall and how it interacts with the broader shift toward factual details, Renoult and his colleagues carried out the new study. The work was led by Greta Melega while she was completing her doctorate at the University of East Anglia; she is now a postdoctoral researcher at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (“and also an elite European Ultimate Frisbee player (!),” Renoult noted).
The researchers recruited 45 younger adults and 45 older adults, all of whom were native English speakers without psychiatric or neurological conditions. After excluding participants who did not finish the study, had poor audio recordings, fell below a cognitive screening threshold, or did not pass an initial training check, the final sample included 37 older adults aged 60 to 85 and 37 younger adults aged 18 to 33.
The two age groups had similar levels of education and did not differ in self-reported symptoms of depression or anxiety, which the authors measured because mood can influence how specifically people recall the past. A subset of 30 younger and 30 older participants also completed standard tests of attention and working memory, showing no statistically significant differences between the age groups.
Participants completed an online memory task where they saw 21 neutral, easy-to-visualize cue words on a screen, one at a time. Depending on the prompt, they had up to one minute to think of either a specific memory (a unique event lasting less than a day, such as having “a good time at Jane’s party last month in London”) or a categoric memory (a repeated event that happened multiple times in a similar way, such as “When I go to Jane’s house, we usually cook together and watch a movie afterwards”).
Once a memory came to mind, they pressed a button and spoke aloud for up to two minutes to describe it in as much detail as possible. After each description, participants had five seconds per question to rate how vivid and emotional the memory was, whether they saw it through their own eyes or as an outside observer, and how long ago it took place.
The experiment was divided into two parts: a baseline block and a switching block. In the baseline block, participants followed one instruction at a time, recalling three specific memories in a row and three categoric memories in a row. In the 14-trial switching block, the instructions to recall specific or categoric memories changed unpredictably every two or three trials. This allowed the scientists to compare “switch trials,” where the rule had just changed from the previous prompt, with “remain trials,” where the rule stayed the same as the prompt right before it.
The research team evaluated the recorded narratives in two ways. First, they measured accuracy, defined as the percentage of memories that matched the prompt given on that trial. Second, for the memories that matched the instructions, the researchers broke the transcripts down to count the exact types of details produced: episodic details (specific sights, times, and feelings of a one-time event), repeated event details (context and sensory details of a recurring routine), semantic details (general facts and personal background knowledge), and other statements like repetitions. Because older adults spoke longer on average than younger adults (about 45 seconds versus 27 seconds) and produced more total details per memory (an average of 11.00 details compared to 7.41), the authors analyzed the proportion of each detail type rather than raw counts.
When looking at overall accuracy, both younger and older participants had a harder time following instructions when they had to juggle both rules in the switching block, dropping from 82 percent accuracy in the baseline block to 73 percent in the switching block. Within the switching block itself, accuracy did not differ between switch trials and remain trials, suggesting that the mental cost came from keeping two different rules in mind at once rather than the immediate act of switching from one trial to the next.
Older adults were not disproportionately harmed by the switching block compared to younger adults. Across the experiment, the two age groups were equally accurate when asked to recall specific, one-time events, with older adults succeeding on 81 percent of trials and younger adults on 80 percent. However, older adults were less accurate than younger adults when instructed to recall categoric, repeated events, matching the instructions 68 percent of the time compared to 81 percent for younger adults. When participants failed to provide a proper categoric memory, they most often defaulted to sharing general personal facts instead of an actual recurring event.
When the researchers examined how participants elaborated on their accurate memories, strong age differences appeared regardless of whether participants were in the baseline or switching block. Even when older adults successfully recalled a unique, one-time event, only 66 percent of the details they shared were specific episodic details, compared to 79 percent for younger adults. In turn, general semantic facts made up 18 percent of older adults’ descriptions of unique events, compared to 13 percent for younger adults.
A similar pattern emerged for categoric memories: older adults included a smaller proportion of on-target repeated event details than younger adults (48 percent versus 72 percent) and a much larger proportion of general semantic information across both blocks (40 to 42 percent for older adults, versus 15 to 24 percent for younger adults).
“As observed previously, older adults consistently produced more semantic (factual) details but less episodic (specific) elements than young adults,” Renoult said. “However, crucially, this was not only observed under specific (episodic) instructions, but also under categoric (semantic) instructions. This suggests that remembering the past using more factual knowledge is adaptive and meaningful to older adults, and not necessarily the result of a compensation, or of a general decline in their memory abilities.”
The study itself did not test what purpose, if any, this narrative style serves.
Increased task demands in the switching block also altered the makeup of memory details. Under categoric instructions, moving to the switching block reduced the proportion of target repeated event details from 67 percent to 54 percent across participants. The paper reports a similar shift under specific instructions, but its figures for that comparison duplicate those given elsewhere, so the size of that effect is uncertain.
The subjective ratings highlighted additional differences in how the two age groups experienced their memories. Even though older adults included proportionally fewer specific details in their stories, they rated their specific memories as more vivid than younger adults did (an average of 3.81 versus 3.53 on a 5-point scale) and rated their memories overall as more emotional (2.92 versus 2.46). Regarding the age of the memories, younger adults mostly drew from the past five years, especially the past year, whereas older adults recalled memories from more than 10 years ago on 39 percent of specific trials and 48 percent of categoric trials, compared to just 15 percent and 7 percent for younger adults.
“It is important to realize that, even though young and older adults remember their past differently (with different narrative style), in these studies participants of both age groups are able to follow the overall instructions and retrieve the relevant type of information in most trials (i.e., they produce the correct type of memory, even if with different amount of details),” Renoult noted. “Nonetheless, the results that we report in this study are consistent with previous findings from our group using different methods.”
Renoult also emphasized that differences in how older adults recount their past should not be mistaken for a broad loss of memory function. “Sometimes people have gloomy views of aging, but not all types of memory decline when we get older, as shown in studies such as ours: Semantic memory (general knowledge of the world) is well preserved in older adults (who sometimes outperform young adults in these tasks).”
As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these results. The study’s design and analysis plan were not preregistered. Because the baseline block was always completed before the switching block so participants could learn the rules, fatigue or the possibility that the easiest memories were used up first could have contributed to the drop in performance during the switching phase. The number of trials was also kept relatively small to prevent tiredness during online testing, which meant the authors could not separately test whether switching rules hurt one memory type more than the other.
In addition, the older adults in this sample performed just as well as the younger undergraduate students on standard cognitive tests of working memory and attention. Because executive control often declines with age, this high-performing group of older adults might not reflect the broader aging population, which could explain why they had no trouble finding specific memories when prompted. The participants were also predominantly female, and they were allowed to choose memories from any point in their lives; future studies could restrict recall to specific time periods and use standardized follow-up prompts to see if older adults can retrieve more specific sensory details when encouraged to do so.
Looking ahead, the research team plans to explore how the social context of a conversation shapes the way people recount their lives. “We are interested to investigate social elements that may influence memory retrieval in aging, such as with whom one is sharing their memories,” Renoult said. “One related bias in the literature is that older adults are typically interviewed by a young adult (e.g., a PhD student, or a research assistant). It is possible that, in such cases, older adults include more general knowledge to provide additional background information for someone of a different age group.”
The study, “Age-Related Differences in Autobiographical Memory Recall: Impact of Retrieval Mode Switching,” was authored by Greta Melega, Alice Bush, Tabitha James, Riccardo Sacripante, and Louis Renoult.