Personal and collective mental time travel across the adult lifespan during COVID-19.

Older adults exhibit an age-related positivity effect, with more positivity for memories than young adults. Theoretical explanations attribute this phenomenon to greater emphasis on emotion regulation and well-being due to shortened time horizons. Adults, across the lifespan, also exhibit a collective negativity bias (more negativity about their country than their personal past and future) and a future-oriented positivity bias (more positivity for future projections than for memories). Threats to global health (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic) may shorten future time horizons which may serve to impact emotional valence for memories and future projections. We investigated this possibility in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic in young, middle-aged, and older adults (N = 434; age: 18-81 years), for positive and negative events in the past (2019) and future (2021) in the personal and collective domains, as well as for future excitement and worry in these same domains in 1 week, 1 year, and 5-10 years' time. We replicated the collective negativity bias and future-oriented positivity bias, indicating the robustness of these phenomena. However, the pattern of age-related positivity diverged for personal events such that young adults exhibited similar positivity to older adults and more positivity than middle-aged adults. Finally, consistent with theoretical proposals of better emotion regulation with age, older adults reported more muted excitement and worry for the long-term future compared to young adults. We discuss the implications of this work for understanding valence-based biases in memory and future projections across the adult lifespan. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Just write it down: Similarity in the benefit from cognitive offloading in young and older adults.

Past research conducted primarily in young adults has demonstrated the utility of cognitive offloading for benefitting performance of memory-based tasks, particularly at high memory loads. At the same time, older adults show declines in a variety of memory abilities, including subtle changes in short-term memory, suggesting that cognitive offloading could also benefit performance of memory-based tasks in this group. To this end, 94 participants (62 young adults, 32 older adults) were tested on a retrospective audiovisual short-term memory task in two blocked conditions. Offloading was permitted in the offloading choice condition but not in the internal memory condition. Performance was improved for both age groups in the offloading choice condition compared to the internal memory condition. Moreover, the choice to use the offloading strategy was similar across age groups at high memory loads, and use of the offloading strategy benefitted performance for young and older adults similarly. These data suggest that older adults can make effective use of cognitive offloading to rescue performance of memory-based activities, and invites future research on the benefits of cognitive offloading for older adults in other, more complex tasks where age-related memory impairment is expected to be more prominent.

Performance on the processing portion of complex working memory span tasks is related to working memory capacity estimates.

Individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) have long been known to relate to performance in domains outside of WM, including attentional control, long-term memory, problem-solving, and fluid intelligence to name a few. Complex span WM tasks, composed of a processing component and a storage component, are often used to index WMC in these types of investigations. Capacity estimates are derived from performance on the storage component only, while processing performance is often largely ignored. Here, we explore the relationship between processing performance and WMC in a large dataset for each of three complex span tasks to better characterize how the components of these tasks might be related. We provide evidence that enforcing an 85% or better accuracy criterion for the processing portion of the task results in the removal of a disproportionate number of individuals exhibiting lower WMC estimates. We also find broad support for differences in processing task performance, characterized according to both accuracy and reaction time metrics, as a function of WMC. We suggest that researchers may want to include processing task performance measures, in addition to capacity estimates, in studies using complex span tasks to index WMC. This approach may better characterize the relationships between complex span task performance and performance in disparate domains of cognition.