Aging and memory for temporal order in naturalistic events

Memory for temporal order is traditionally viewed as a type of associative memory that declines with age. However, most of our understanding of age-related change in retrieving specific temporal associations comes from studies that examine the memory of simple, arbitrary lists of items. Relatively less is known about how the learning and retrieval of naturalistic narratives change with age. Narratives are of interest because they incorporate temporal structure characteristic of everyday experience and because their comprehension depends on semantic background knowledge. In this study, younger and older adults read narratives with a two-level hierarchical structure in which fine-grained subevents were nested within larger coarse-grained events. For some narratives, semantic knowledge could be informative about the order of coarse-grained events; for other narratives, knowledge could be informative about the order of fine-grained subevents. After reading, participants completed tests of memory for temporal order and temporal distance. Both younger and older adults took advantage of semantic knowledge about coarse-grained or fine-grained temporal structure to better remember event order, with older adults exhibiting greater knowledge-related benefits. Both groups also remembered pairs of fine-grained events as farther apart when they spanned a coarse-grained event boundary, indicating preserved event-based organization in memory across age. When making metamemory judgments, older adults' confidence ratings were more liberal and less sensitive to their actual memory performance than those of younger adults. Together, these results suggest that the ability to use knowledge about the typical temporal structure of activity to remember specific event sequences is robust across the adult lifespan. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).