Autobiographical memory specificity in younger and older adults as a function of cue type.

Abstract

Autobiographical memory specificity commonly declines with age, but the role of emotion in modulating this deficit is unclear. Prior studies have typically used the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT) paradigm and have asked younger and older participants to produce autobiographical memories in response to emotional and neutral cue words. However, these studies have often confounded cue valence with cue concreteness. To address this problem, in this study younger and older adults completed an AMT task that used negative, neutral, and positive cue words, which were either abstract or concrete. Results showed an age-related decline in autobiographical memory specificity, but the magnitude of this deficit depended upon cue type. For abstract cue words, older adults' autobiographical memory specificity was lower than that of younger adults for the negative and neutral cues, but there was no age difference in specificity for the positive cues, a finding that aligns with other reports of age-related positivity effects. In contrast, for concrete cue words, cue valence did not impact autobiographical memory specificity, with similar age differences in specificity for all three cue valences. These findings highlight the importance of considering characteristics of the AMT cues when evaluating autobiographical memory specificity for younger and older adults.