A positivity effect in older adults' memorability judgments of pictures

BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: A growing literature suggests that older adults are biased to preferentially cognitively process positively valenced information. The authors investigated whether this bias extended to preferential selection of information to remember, and also examined whether the arousal invoked by stimuli biased item selection and memory.

Thirty older (63-88 years of age) and 30 younger (18-25 years of age) adults viewed emotional (positive, negative) and neutral pictures that varied in arousal (low, high), and were asked to select a subset they deemed memorable (memorability judgments), before recalling pictures. Repeated-measures analyses of variance were conducted to examine aging-related differences in selection and recall of positive, negative, and neutral pictures, and of low- and high-arousal pictures.

Older adults selected more positive pictures as memorable, whereas in younger adults selection did not differ by valence. In both age groups, recall of positive pictures was highest. Older adults selected more low- than high-arousal pictures as memorable, although recall was greater for high- than low-arousal pictures in both age groups.

Findings are consistent with the view that the aging-related positivity bias is under cognitive control, and suggest an awareness of this in older adults. Future investigations should seek to disentangle the influence of positive valence from other factors (e.g., perceptual, semantic, arousal level) on older adults' memorability judgments.