Detail memory for similar short stories among older and younger adults

Studies of pattern separation have consistently shown poorer performance among older adults when identifying perceptually similar objects compared to younger adults, despite equal performance at recognizing repeated objects. Additionally, tasks that embed or overlay objects on contexts reliably show benefits from repeating the context but detriments when the context is shifted, particularly for older adults. However, it remains unclear as to how performance on these tasks generalize to everyday memory functioning. Pattern separation is likely critical for utilizing not only subtle perceptual details but also other rich sensory and semantic information that fill an episodic memory and often not accounted for on traditional object recognition tasks. In the present study, we designed a task to assess the memory for details of short narrative stories among younger (n = 20) and older adults (n = 20). Participants listened to 20 stories while viewing a unique picture of the context of the event, followed by a yes/no recognition task asking about an identical or semantically similar detail. Context during recognition was also manipulated, such that questions were paired in either the same, consistent, inconsistent, or Fourier-transformed image conditions. Older and younger adults did not differ when answering questions about the identical detail, but age interacted with context, such that the same context benefitted recognition memory for younger but not older adults. Surprisingly, older and younger adults did not differ when identifying similar details. Taken together, our results indicate that age-related impairments observed viewing visually similar objects may not extend to conceptually similar details of narrative stories.