Scientists from the University of East Anglia studied how age affects autobiographical memory - the system that stores the story of our lives. The work was published in the journal Psychology and Aging. The final sample included 37 older adults aged 60 to 85 and 37 younger adults aged 18 to 33, all native English speakers without mental or neurological disorders.
Participants were shown cue words on a screen and asked to recall either a specific event (a unique episode lasting less than a day) or a repeated situation (for example, a weekly habit of cooking with a friend). They then had to describe the memory in as much detail as possible. The experiment had two parts: in one the rules stayed the same, in the other the instructions switched unpredictably.
The results showed that when participants had to hold two different rules in mind, accuracy dropped for everyone - from 82% to 73%. The decline was linked not to the moment of switching itself but to the need to keep both instructions in mind at once. Older adults performed no worse than younger ones when recalling a specific event (81% versus 80% correct). But on the repeated-events task they made errors more often: 68% versus 81%.
The main difference emerged in how participants described their memories. Even after successfully recalling a unique event, older adults included only 66% specific details (what they saw, heard, felt) in their account, compared with 79% for younger adults. But older adults had more general facts about themselves: 18% versus 13% for younger adults. When describing repeated events the gap was even wider: 48% specific details for older adults versus 72% for younger, and general information 40-42% versus 15-24%.
At the same time, older adults rated their memories as more vivid (3.81 versus 3.53 on a five-point scale) and more emotional (2.92 versus 2.46). Younger adults more often recalled events from the past five years, while older adults in 39% of cases drew on memories more than ten years old.
The lead author of the work, Louis Renoult, emphasizes: "The fact that older people more often rely on factual knowledge may be adaptive and meaningful for them, rather than a consequence of compensation or general memory decline." He also noted that semantic memory - general knowledge about the world - does not deteriorate with age, and sometimes older adults even outperform younger ones on such tasks.
The authors warn of limitations: the study was not preregistered, the older participants were recruited from among those who perform well on cognitive tests, and the sample was predominantly female. In addition, fatigue or the order of tasks could have influenced the results. The scientists plan to devote further work to the social context - with whom exactly a person shares memories.