Impaired retrieval monitoring for past and future autobiographical events in older adults

Older adults are more likely than younger adults to confuse real and imagined events in episodic memory. This deficit may be attributed to a reduction in the specific features available for recollection (i.e., retrieval success) or to a deficit in the search and decision processes operating during recollection attempts (i.e., retrieval monitoring). The present experiments used a two-phase event-generation task to manipulate retrieval success and test for age-related deficits in retrieval monitoring. In the first phase, participants generated real autobiographical events from their past and imagined plausible future events in response to cue words. We used elaboration instructions to experimentally manipulate the amount of features associated with these generated events. In the second phase administered 24 hours later, we gave recollection tests that required participants to discriminate between these previously generated past and future events in memory. As predicted, the elaboration manipulation increased the amount of features that could be recollected in association with the generated events in both age groups (including cognitive operations in Experiment 1 and perceptual details in Experiment 2). However, older adults were more likely than younger adults to confuse past and future events in memory, and critically, elaboration did not minimize these age-related confusions. These findings imply that aging impairs the ability to accurately monitor retrieval for features that are characteristic of autobiographical events, above and beyond age-related impairments in the retrieval of the recollected information itself.