A day that America will remember: flashbulb memory, collective memory, and future thinking for the capitol riots.

ABSTRACTThis study explores the topics of flashbulb memory, collective identity, future thinking, and shared representations for a public event. We assessed the memories of the Capitol Riots, which happened in Washington DC, on 6 January 2021. Seventy Belgian and seventy-nine American citizens participated in an online study, in which they freely recalled the unfolding of Capitol Riots and answered questions regarding their memory. Inter-subjects similarity of recalled details was analysed using a schematic narrative template (i.e., the event, the causes and the consequences). Results revealed that representations of the event, and its causes were more similar among Belgians compared to Americans, whereas Americans' representations of the consequences showed more similarity than Belgians'. Also, as expected, Americans reported more flashbulb memories (FBMs) than Belgians. The analysis underlined the importance of rehearsal through media and communication in FBM formation. This research revealed a novel relation between FBM and future representations. Regardless of national identity, participants who formed an FBM were more likely to think that the event would be remembered in the future, that the government should memorialise the event, and that a similar attack on the Capitol could happen in the future compared to participants who did not form FBM.

Shared vivid remembering: age-related differences in across-participants similarity of neural representations during encoding and retrieval.

Recent advances in multivariate neuroimaging analyses have made possible the examination of the similarity of the neural patterns of activations measured across participants, but it has not been investigated yet whether such measure is age-sensitive. Here, in the scanner, young and older participants viewed scene pictures associated with labels. At test, participants were presented with the labels and were asked to recollect the associated picture. We used Pattern Similarity Analyses by which we compared patterns of neural activation during the encoding or the remembering of each picture of one participant with the averaged pattern of activation across the remaining participants. Results revealed that across-participants neural similarity was higher in young than in older adults in distributed occipital, temporal and parietal areas during encoding and retrieval. These findings demonstrate that an age-related reduction in specificity of neural activation is also evident when the similarity of neural representations is examined across participants.

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

It has been frequently described that older adults subjectively report the vividness of their memories as being as high, or even higher, than young adults, despite poorer objective memory performance. Here, we review studies that examined age-related differences in the subjective experience of memory vividness. By examining vividness calibration and resolution, studies using different types of approaches converge to suggest that older adults overestimate the intensity of their vividness ratings relative to young adults, and that they rely on retrieved memory details to a lesser extent to judge vividness. We discuss potential mechanisms underlying these observations. Inflation of memory vividness with regard to the richness of memory content may stem from age-differences in vividness criterion or scale interpretation and psycho-social factors. The reduced reliance on episodic memory details in older adults may stem from age-related differences in how they monitor these details to make their vividness ratings. Considered together, these findings emphasize the importance of examining age-differences in memory vividness using different analytical methods and they provide valuable evidence that the subjective experience of remembering is more than the reactivation of memory content. In this vein, we recommend that future studies explore the links between memory vividness and other subjective memory scales (e.g., ratings of details or memory confidence) in healthy aging and/or other populations, as it could be used as a window to better characterize the cognitive processes that underpin the subjective assessment of the quality of recollected events.

Shared event memory in aging: Across-participants similarity of vividness judgements decreases with age.

When they remember the same events, humans recollect common episodic traces. For making vividness judgements, older adults rely less than young adults on retrieved episodic details. Here, we examined the similarity of the subjective experience of remembering and the associated memory content across participants and we investigated age-effects. Young and older adults studied pictures associated with labels. At retrieval, participants judged the vividness of their memories and recalled pictures details. We examined the similarity of vividness judgements and memory recall across-participants. Across-participants similarity in vividness judgements was higher in young than in older adults, while no age-difference in the similarity of the richness of memory recall between participants was found. Together, these findings suggest that older adults' vividness ratings are less similar from one participant to another than those of young adults, which may be explained by how older adults use memory details to frame their sense of memory vividness.

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

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. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Deciphering the relationship between objective and subjective aspects of recollection in healthy aging.

Although healthy aging has been related to a decline in recollection as indexed by objective measures, the subjective experience of recollection sometimes remains stable. To date, however, these age-related differences have only been examined using aggregated data across trials. In the current study, we investigated the relationship between subjective and objective measures of recollection on a trial-by-trial basis to determine whether the magnitude of this relationship was similar in young and older adults. Young and older participants were presented with pictures that were associated with descriptive labels at encoding. At retrieval, they were cued with the labels and were asked to rate the vividness of their memory for the associated picture and to recall as many details of the picture as possible. On average, older adults assigned higher vividness ratings but recalled fewer episodic details than young adults. Mixed-effects modelling revealed that the relationship between subjective (vividness) and objective (number of recalled details) recollection across trials was stronger in young than in older participants. These findings provide evidence that older adults not only retrieve fewer episodic details but also rely on these details to a lesser extent than young adults for judging the subjective quality of their memories.

A gist orientation before retrieval impacts the objective content but not the subjective experience of episodic memory.

A gist retrieval-orientation decreases one's ability to remember objective details from past experiences. Here, we examined whether a gist retrieval-orientation manipulation can impact both the objective and subjective aspects of remembering. Young participants took part in two cued-recollection tasks in which they studied pictures associated with labels; at retrieval, from the labels, they evaluated the vividness of their memories of the corresponding pictures, and recalled picture details. Before retrieval, participants were submitted either to a gist or a control retrieval-orientation (one per task). Results revealed that the amount of recalled details was lower following the gist condition while vividness ratings did not differ between the two retrieval orientations. Critically, the amount of recalled details predicted the corresponding vividness ratings to a similar extent in the gist and control conditions, thus suggesting that recollected memory traces in the gist condition were still rich enough to be judged as subjectively vivid.

Interactions with the integrative memory model.

The integrative memory model formalizes a new conceptualization of memory in which interactions between representations and cognitive operations within large-scale cerebral networks generate subjective memory feelings. Such interactions allow to explain the complexity of memory expressions, such as the existence of multiples sources for familiarity and recollection feelings and the fact that expectations determine how one recognizes previously encountered information.

Age-related differences in the neural correlates of vivid remembering.

When recollecting events, older adults typically report similar memory vividness levels as young adults, while they actually retrieve fewer episodic details. This suggests that young and older adults use episodic details differently to calibrate their vividness judgements. Capitalizing on the idea that remembering reactivates brain regions that initially processed details at encoding, the current fMRI study sought to examine these age-related changes in the basis of vivid recollection. At encoding, young and older adults saw pictures associated with labels and these labels were then used as retrieval cues for recalling the associated pictures and making memory vividness judgments. Results showed that highly vivid memories were associated with greater activity in the precuneus in young than older adults. Furthermore, the direct comparison between encoding and retrieval patterns of activity using Representational Similarity Analyses revealed stronger item-specific reactivation in the posterior cingulate/retrosplenial cortex in young than older adults. Taken together, these results provide new evidence that aging is associated with reduced reinstatement of activity in brain regions that processed the encoding of complex stimuli, but older individuals judge these impoverished memory representations as subjectively vivid.

The Impact of Semantic Relatedness on Associative Memory in Aging Depending on the Semantic Relationships between the Memoranda.

Background: Aging is characterized by a decline in associative memory. However, under some conditions, such as in the presence of semantic relatedness within the association, the age-related associative decline can be attenuated. In this study, we evaluated whether the nature of the semantic relationship between the memoranda (taxonomic versus thematic) could modulate the impact of semantic relatedness on older adults' associative memory. Methods: We assessed 40 young adults and 40 older adults' associative memory for associations that were either taxonomically-related, thematically-related, or unrelated. Results: While the main results showed age-related differences in all associative memory tasks without attenuation by semantic relatedness, the results after excluding 4 outlier older participants suggest that older adults' associative memory performance did not differ from that of young adults for thematically-related pairs, while there was an age-related difference in associative memory for taxonomically-related pairs as well as for unrelated pairs. Discussion: This could suggest that the nature of the semantic relationship between the memoranda can modulate the impact of semantic relatedness on older adults' associative memory performance, although the reason why this is not the case for all older participants still needs to be understood.

How to induce an age-related benefit of semantic relatedness in associative memory: It's all in the design.

The age-related associative memory deficit can be alleviated, under some conditions, when to-be-remembered associations are semantically related. In this study, we explored the experimental conditions in which older adults benefited from semantic relatedness and those that hindered any associative memory improvement. We did so by manipulating the level of semantic support within the associations presented at encoding and within the recombined pairs (i.e., the lures) at retrieval, such that pairs with high semantic support at encoding were recombined into pairs with equally high or with lower level of semantic support, and vice versa. We predicted that semantic relatedness would benefit older adults' associative memory when there was a decrease in semantic support from encoding to retrieval. Conversely, older adults' associative memory would be hindered when a recombination was equally or more familiar than the studied association. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the presence versus absence of semantic relatedness within associations both at encoding and at retrieval. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the frequency of related associations at encoding and at retrieval. Taken together, the results showed that older adults' associative memory was better in conditions in which associations closely matched semantic knowledge at encoding and were recombined into associations with no or less semantic support at retrieval. In contrast, older adults' performance was worse for semantically poorer associations at encoding that were recombined into associations with greater semantic support at retrieval. This suggests that older adults' associative memory can be improved by semantic support under specific experimental conditions only. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Do Alzheimer's Disease Patients Benefit From Prior-Knowledge in Associative Recognition Memory?

OBJECTIVES: Although the influence of prior knowledge on associative memory in healthy aging has received great attention, it has never been studied in Alzheimer's disease (AD). This study aimed at assessing whether AD patients could benefit from prior knowledge in associative memory and whether such benefit would be related to the integrity of their semantic memory. METHODS: Twenty-one AD patients and 21 healthy older adults took part in an associative memory task using semantically related and unrelated word pairs and were also submitted to an evaluation of their semantic memory. RESULTS: While participants of both groups benefited from semantic relatedness in associative discrimination, related pairs recognition was significantly predicted by semantic memory integrity in healthy older adults only. CONCLUSIONS: We suggest that patients benefitted from semantic knowledge to improve their performance in the associative memory task, but that such performance is not related to semantic knowledge integrity evaluation measures because the two tasks differ in the way semantic information is accessed: in an automatic manner for the associative memory task, with automatic processes thought to be relatively preserved in AD, and in a controlled manner for the semantic knowledge evaluation, with controlled processes thought to be impaired in AD. (JINS, 2019, 25, 443-452).

Temporal compression in episodic memory for real-life events.

Remembering an event typically takes less time than experiencing it, suggesting that episodic memory represents past experience in a temporally compressed way. Little is known, however, about how the continuous flow of real-life events is summarised in memory. Here we investigated the nature and determinants of temporal compression by directly comparing memory contents with the objective timing of events as measured by a wearable camera. We found that episodic memories consist of a succession of moments of prior experience that represent events with varying compression rates, such that the density of retrieved information is modulated by goal processing and perceptual changes. Furthermore, the results showed that temporal compression rates remain relatively stable over one week and increase after a one-month delay, particularly for goal-related events. These data shed new light on temporal compression in episodic memory and suggest that compression rates are adaptively modulated to maintain current goal-relevant information.