Cross-cultural differences in social and self-referential memory are magnified with age

Social content and thinking about information in relation to the self may attenuate age-related declines in associative memory. However, it's unclear whether these strategies are similarly effective across cultures due to potential differences in the prioritization of social and self-relevant information. The present study compared Taiwanese and American younger and older adults on associative memory for social information across two encoding conditions. Specifically, they related object-scene image pairs containing varying levels of social information (i.e. none, low and high) to themselves (i.e. self-referencing) or to a distant-other (i.e. other-referencing). We replicated a prior finding in a new sample of Taiwanese participants in which other-referencing (vs self-referencing) enhanced older adults' memory for high social trials, relative to younger adults. In contrast, this pattern did not emerge for Americans; older American participants' memory performance was relatively consistent across self- vs. other-referencing and the level of social information, and there was no interaction with age. These findings suggest that cultural differences in memory for high social (relative to low and nonsocial) information emerge for older, but not younger, adults, particularly when participants are asked to think about another person. Therefore, culture may influence the effectiveness of strategies to reduce age-related associative memory impairments.