Social Functions of Autobiographical Memory Integration in Older Adults

Older adults recall autobiographical event memories in laboratory settings with significantly fewer internal episodic details (‘the shirt was yellow’) and greater external or semantic details (‘I have always liked yellow’) than do younger adults (Simpson et al., 2023). This decline in ‘episodic specificity’ has been thought to reflect deleterious changes in brain functioning (Amer et al., 2022; Piolino et al., 2010; Reuter-Lorenz & Cappell, 2008; Williams, 2006), where more general details are recalled to compensate for deficits in specific episodic retrieval abilities. However, an alternative interpretation suggests that age-related changes in autobiographical memory recall may not solely indicate a deficit but could instead represent an adaptive shift in storytelling style (Grilli & Sheldon, 2022). Older adults may use semantic or extra-event details that add temporal context (i.e., a timeline to situate the story’s main event; “time integration”) or highlight personal significance (i.e., a key lesson or takeaway; “meaning integration”) within a narrative. These storytelling strategies may enhance social connection and communication by making narratives more interesting and easier to follow. The social role of autobiographical memory can be generally understood as utilizing memories to develop, maintain, and strengthen social bonds (Alea & Bluck, 2007; Fivush et al., 2003), as well as to share important life lessons with others (Fivush et al., 2003). Coherent, integrated narratives may also enhance social functions of autobiographical memory. For example, when narrating traumatic events, veterans with more temporally coherent memories also perceived social support and communication with others to be more positive (Burnell et al., 2010). Vanaken et al. (2022) also observed that narrative coherence was positively related to emotional well-being, but that this relationship was partially mediated by perceived social support. Young adult participants view relationships as closer when sharing more general, recurring events than specific, single events (Waters et al., 2014), suggesting that higher-level abstraction may provide social benefits. In a similar study, sharing personal information in a memory was associated with greater feelings of social closeness in both the storyteller and the listener. However, this study found that specific memories were more closely related to closeness than general memories (Guan & Wang, 2022). In investigations focusing on listener perceptions, individuals are more willing to interact, support, trust, and feel positive towards storytellers with more chronologically and thematically coherent spoken narratives (Vanaken et al., 2021). Present evidence suggests that the integration of time and meaning, along with their associated concepts, may be linked to the social functions of autobiographical memory. Nonetheless, evidence concerning the relative contribution of these tendencies to social functions across different age groups remains underexplored. In this investigation, our primary goal is to understand whether integration confers social benefits. We will investigate whether the integration of time or meaning in autobiographical memory confers social or communication benefits, using synthetic memories. Specifically, we aim to assess whether memories that are time-integrated, more meaning-integrated, or both, are more likely than non-integrated memories to be perceived as clear, authentic, informational, relatable, or interesting by a conversation partner. We build on previous work investigating listener perceptions (i.e., Vanaken et al., 2021) in several ways: 1) we include a representative sample of the United States population, expanding upon Vanaken and colleague’s (2021) sample of primarily young Dutch women, 2) we assess and control for autobiographical memory specificity across all narratives to reduce confounding, 3) we utilize a different coding scheme to include subdimensions of self and non-self related meaning integrative statements. We hypothesize that memories that are time- and meaning-integrated will be perceived as more authentic, informative, relatable, and interesting than those that are not integrated. We hypothesize that memories that are time-integrated will also be easier to follow. Lastly, we hypothesize that the integration of time and meaning will not impact the perceived vividness of a memory.