Building better memories: The dynamic interplay of social information and self-referencing in associative memory performance with age.

Objective: Recent research has highlighted the potential of social information to mitigate age-related associative memory deficits, yet the influence of the self-reference effect remains a confounding factor. This study aimed to disentangle the effects of social information from self- or other-referencing on associative memory in young and older adults.

Method: A total of 25 young adults and 25 older adults participated in our study. Participants encoded object-scene pairs using self- or other-referencing with scenes containing varying levels of social information (high, low, or none).

Results: Results revealed that self-referencing improved recall for object-low social information pairs in both age groups, but older adults did not benefit similarly in object-no social information trials. For object-high social information pairs, other-referencing notably enhanced older adults' associative memory performance compared to self-referencing. This interaction was particularly evident in older adults with low executive function.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that tailoring encoding strategies based on the level of social information could potentially alleviate associative memory deficits, particularly in older adults with low executive function. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).