Self-reference enhances relational memory in young and older adults

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Human Memory

Background:

• Relational memory, crucial for daily life, involves recalling relationships between items.
• Self-reference effect (SRE) typically enhances memory, but its impact on relational memory, especially in older adults, requires further investigation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine how self-reference influences internal source memory and associative memory.
• To compare the self-reference effect on relational memory in young versus older adults.

Main Methods:

• Participants encoded object-location word pairs using imagination or sentence generation.
• Encoding strategies were applied under self-reference or other-reference (famous person) conditions.
• Internal source memory and associative memory were assessed.

Main Results:

• Both young and older adults demonstrated enhanced memory performance in self-reference conditions compared to other-reference conditions.
• The self-referential memory benefit in older adults was observed for both internal source and associative memory.
• This benefit was independent of participants' general memory capacity and executive functioning levels.

Conclusions:

• Self-reference effectively enhances relational memory across the adult lifespan.
• Older adults benefit from self-reference for relational memory, even with lower memory or executive function.
• Findings suggest self-reference is a robust strategy for improving relational memory in aging populations.