Short-term memory for scenes in healthy aging: Impaired visuospatial details but preserved structural gists

Memory for details declines with typical aging, whereas gist memory is preserved. Yet, the exact nature of the gist memory representations that are preserved in older adults is not fully understood. Most studies have investigated memory for conceptual gists or general, superordinate, features. In contrast, older adults' memory for visuospatial, structural gists has received little attention. In the present study, we designed a new forced-choice recognition memory task that enables to assess short-term memory for structural gists and scene details while overcoming prior limitations such as the confounding between structural and conceptual gists and unbalanced task difficulty. The paradigm is composed of a gist memory task and a detail memory task. In two pilot studies conducted online in young participants (N = 120 overall), we (a) selected the image pairs most suited for our tasks and (b) validated the task procedure by showing that shortening encoding time impacted performance in the detail memory task more than in the gist memory task, supporting that detailed and gist representations are involved in these conditions, respectively. In the main, preregistered experiment, we investigated age-related differences in short-term memory for structural gists and scene details (N = 50 younger and N = 50 older participants). As predicted, performance in the detail memory task, but not in the gist memory task, was lower in older adults compared to younger adults, while task difficulty was balanced between the tasks. Overall, our results support that the preservation of gist memories in typical aging extends to the basic layout of the scene in which an event took place. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).