Folville-2022-I Remember It Like It Was Yester Part 3

Together, findings from studies examining vividness resolution and the aforementioned explanations converge to suggest that older adults may not necessarily use episodic memory details to make their vividness ratings. This pattern may be due to age-related differences in memory encoding processes (i.e., the ability to properly focus on the perceptive details of experience); episodic recollection (i.e., the ability to properly reinstate precise and numerous details from past episodic memory traces); memory monitoring processes (i.e., the ability to efficiently use these details to make memory quality ratings); and non-episodic memory mechanisms (i.e., the ability to narrate retrieved memories in a specific fashion and the capacity to update vividness ratings across trials). 

Resolution refers to the number of pixels in a screen or photo, and it affects the quality of the image we see. Memory is one of the functions of our brain that helps us store and recall information. Resolution and memory may seem unrelated, but in fact, they are closely linked.

Images with higher resolution will be clearer than images with lower resolution and are easier for our brains to accept and remember. For example, if we look at the same picture, one with low resolution and the other with high resolution, then the high-resolution picture will be easier to recall and will leave a deeper impression on us. This is because high-resolution images have more and finer details, so they can better activate the visual cognitive functions of our brains and improve our attention and memory.

In addition, with the continuous development of technology, more and more electronic products are beginning to use high-resolution screens, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc. The images displayed by these devices are very clear, allowing us to observe the images more deeply and perceive visual information more completely. This also helps us better understand all aspects of things and get better results in study and work.

All in all, there is indeed a close relationship between resolution and memory. High-resolution images can help us observe and understand things better, stimulate our brain's visual cognitive abilities, and improve our concentration and memory. Therefore, we should actively pursue high-resolution images so that they can become good assistants in our study and work and improve our work and study efficiency. It can be seen that we need to improve memory, and Cistanche deserticola can significantly improve memory because Cistanche deserticola is a traditional Chinese medicinal material that has many unique effects, one of which is to improve memory. The efficacy of minced meat comes from its various active ingredients, including acid, polysaccharides, flavonoids, etc. These ingredients can promote brain health in various ways.

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Again, we do not assume that these possibilities are mutually exclusive, but rather that their influence on older adults’ subjective experience of memory vividness might depend on several situational factors. In the following section, age differences in other subjective scales than memory vividness will be briefly described, as we believe that they could provide valuable information as to how older individuals use retrieved features to make their subjective memory ratings.

Age-related differences in other subjective memory scales than vividness

As described earlier, the phenomenological experience accompanying episodic memory retrieval can refer to various other dimensions than memory vividness. As such, previous studies have examined age-related differences in subjective scales assessing the intensity of reliving, the visual details of the remembered event, the spatial location of objects in the recollected scene, or the thoughts experienced during memory encoding (De Brigard et al., 2016; Hashtroudi et al., 1990). In the literature, particular emphasis has been given to scales assessing the subjective quantity of retrieved details or the amount of sensory and perceptual information. 

Accordingly, existing studies have revealed that older participants produced subjective ratings assessing memory for event details that were as high or higher than young adults when remembering laboratory pictures (McDonough et al., 2014), recent real-life events (Folville, Jeunehomme et al., 2020; Shahin Hashtroudi et al., 1990), remote autobiographical memories (Brigard et al., 2016) or when imagining future and atemporal events and scenes (Robin & Moscovitch, 2017). Again, older adults reported strong subjective phenomenological ratings in the face of poorer source memory (Gallo et al., 2011; McDonough & Gallo, 2013) or free-recall performance (Robin & Moscovitch, 2017), thus supporting the assumption that they show reduced calibration and inflate the intensity of their subjective memory judgments.

One could argue that these findings largely echo those observed with subjective vividness ratings and that these types of subjective memory judgments might show similar patterns concerning age differences in memory resolution. One recent finding contradicts this assumption, however. As described earlier, when examining age differences in memory vividness for recent real-life events, we found that older adults produced vividness ratings that were higher than young adults and that the vividness ratings of young, but not older adults, closely followed the corresponding amount of retrieved details (Folville, Jeunehomme, et al., 2020). In that study, other dimensions than vividness were assessed. 

Notably, we found that older adults produced ratings that were higher than young adults when they judged the amount of visual details of the remembered event (Figure 2). Interestingly, the examination of memory resolution between visual details ratings and the amount of episodic details yielded an unexpected finding. While the trial-by-trial intensity of subjective ratings was predicted by the amount of episodic details in young but not in older adults for the vividness dimension, young and older adults’ subjective memory ratings followed the corresponding amount of retrieved details to a similar extent for the subjective scale assessing visual details (see Figure 2, Folville, Jeunehomme et al., 2020). In other words, the number of episodic details predicted the corresponding subjective memory ratings for some (i.e., visual details), but not all (i.e., vividness), phenomenological dimensions.

These findings are particularly important for three main reasons. First, they suggest that older adults show reduced subjective memory calibration, regardless of the approach (i.e., laboratory stimuli or autobiographical/future events) or the type of scale (i.e., vividness, quantity of perceptive/visual details) used. Second, these results provide further evidence that calibration and resolution are two separate and dissociable metacognitive constructs. Indeed, we found that age differences in mean subjective ratings were similar across the scales while age differences in the extent of the trial-by-trial relation between these ratings and event details differed between the two phenomenological dimensions. It is thus important to not only measure age differences in mean memory vividness and recall but also to examine the trial-by-trial relation between the two measures. Third, these vividness resolution results might be taken as evidence that older adults, in some cases, adjust their subjective memory ratings about the corresponding quantity of memory details to a similar extent as young participants. 

It could be that assessing the richness of visual details in memory is less abstract than assessing memory vividness so that older participants would have insights as to the type of information (namely, visual details) that they should use to make their ratings (which might be less the case with “vividness”). Asking older adults what they understand by “vividness” or conducting a study in which half the older adults receive a detailed definition of memory vividness while the other half does not might help in answering this question. Concerning theoretical hypotheses that aimed at explaining why there is an age-related reduction in vividness resolution, this finding questions an interpretation in terms of age differences in non-episodic mechanisms (i.e., executive functioning and narrative style); otherwise, the same pattern of responses would be expected for all subjective memory scales. 

This observation also argues against the possibility that older participants have more difficulties in encoding and binding episodic memory features than their younger counterparts. The finding that older adults can retrieve and use episodic details to make their subjective ratings regarding the visual details of their memories also questions an interpretation of the age-related deficit in vividness resolution in terms of age-related recollection decline (because older adults seem to be able to recollect episodic memory details and then to use them for their ratings). Rather, it suggests that older adults encode, and retrieve, but do not necessarily use, episodic memory features for their subjective memory judgments (Johnson et al., 2015; Koutstaal, 2003). This finding thus supports the hypothesis that the reduced relation between vividness and event details in older adults can be partly explained by the fact that older adults may monitor retrieved details in a different way than young participants during memory retrieval. Of course, the other causes (i.e., age-related differences in memory encoding, memory recollection, and non-episodic mechanisms) might also, to some extent, explain the age-related deficit in vividness resolution, but we believe that their contribution to the phenomenon might be less important than the age-related difference in memory monitoring processes. Of course, these findings need replication before strong conclusions are drawn, but they offer promise for future research.

Other previous studies have examined age differences in the subjective experience of memory using memory confidence. These studies suggest that older adults less precisely calibrate their confidence ratings about memory accuracy than young adults (Dodson et al., 2007; Wong et al., 2012). This assumption is further supported by existing evidence showing that older adults are more likely than their younger counterparts to assign confidence judgments of high intensity to incorrect/new items (Dodson et al., 2007; Fandakova et al., 2013; Jacoby & Rhodes, 2006; Kelley & Sahakyan, 2003; Shing et al., 2009). Findings regarding age-related differences in confidence resolution are less clear. Some previous studies have revealed an age-related decrement in the monitoring (i.e., resolution) of subjective memory judgments (Kelley & Sahakyan, 2003; Wong et al., 2012) while other studies did not report any age-group difference (Hertzog et al., 2021). 

It is interesting to note that patterns of vividness and confidence show similarities across comparable memory tasks. As already mentioned, memory vividness and confidence judgments are correlated constructs in autobiographical memory tasks (Robinson et al.,2000; Sharot et al., 2007). Besides, it has been shown that these two types of memory judgments were higher when the remembered episode was emotional rather than neutral (Talarico & Rubin, 2003; Xie & Zhang, 2017). Likewise, brain-injured patients with parietal lesions were found to produce lower rates of vividness (Berryhill et al., 2007) and confidence (Simons et al., 2010) responses, thus suggesting that these judgments might be based, at least to some extent, on a common memory strength signal. Also relevant and somewhat similar to what has been concluded regarding age differences in vividness resolution in the present review is that the age-related decline in confidence resolution has been in part attributed to age-related differences in memory monitoring processes (Wong et al., 2012).

Memory vividness and memory confidence are usually not examined together within the same task but one may wonder whether vividness and confidence might show the same pattern of responses concerning an objective measure of the richness of memory retrieval. Do confidence resolution and vividness resolution correlate, and if so, are there instances in which these measures might diverge? Are older adults who display low confidence resolution also those who show a reduction in the extent of the vividness of episodic details relationship? Eventually, examining whether, and under which conditions, these types of subjective judgments correlate might help in understanding whether they track the same memory strength signal. Such investigation would also provide important insights into the cognitive mechanisms supporting metacognitive monitoring.

Finally, it is important to note that the subjective experience of remembering can be also operationalized using remembering judgments in recognition memory paradigms. Remember judgments are typically used as a subjective assessment of episodic remembering. They index recognition based on the retrieval of contextual features (Gardiner et al., 1998). A discrepancy between the rates of Remember responses and performance in objective measures of episodic memory has been reported on a few occasions. For instance, older participants are more likely than their younger counterparts to assign Remember responses to false details or unstudied items (McCabe & Balota, 2007) and it may be even more the case for naturalistic rather than laboratory events (Diamond et al., 2020). Similarly, a few studies have shown that older adults assigned as many Remember responses as young adults in recognition memory paradigms, despite lower source memory performance (Duarte et al., 2006, 2008; Mark & Rugg, 1998). The fact that older adults usually report lower amounts of Remember responses indexing memory recollection than young adults in traditional recognition memory tasks (Koen & Yonelinas, 2014) suggests that these studies are the exception rather than the rule. Critically, a recent study that directly contrasted Remember judgments and source memory performance within the same task concluded that the extent of age differences in rates of Remember responses might depend on older participants’ cognitive profile, the nature of the memory task, and how to Remember responses are analyzed (Alghamdi & Rugg, 2020).

In the next section, practical and theoretical implications of the ideas discussed above for accounts of the subjective experience of memory vividness will be presented.

Implications and perspectives

In the current review, we assume that the subjective experience of memory vividness must be considered concerning two dimensions: the mean values of the subjective ratings about averaged objective memory measures (i.e., calibration) and the trial-by-trial adjustment of these ratings to the amount of retrieved memory details (i.e., resolution). We believe that comparing the mean intensity of subjective ratings can be informative in many ways but that the trial-by-trial approach can reveal important insights about young and older adults’ patterns of responses that may have otherwise remained unknown. Particularly relevant to illustrate this point is the aforementioned finding that older participants produced subjective ratings that were higher than young adults for both the vividness scale and the scale assessing the visual details of memory, while the amount of episodic details predicted the intensity of these ratings for the latter but not for the former dimension. In this context, it would be useful for future studies collecting subjective memory ratings like vividness and an objective measure of memory retrieval to systematically link the two dimensions with a trial-by-trial approach. Such an approach using different types of analyses is already widely used in studies investigating memory confidence, and there is no reason why it could not be systematically applied to subjective memory vividness ratings.

From a theoretical perspective, the studies described here have implications for accounts of the subjective experience of memory vividness. Indeed, the finding that older adults’ vividness ratings are less closely tied to episodic details provide evidence that the subjective experience of memory vividness is more than just the retrieval of memory content. Rather, it suggests that the objective and subjective dimensions of episodic memory are in part supported by distinct cognitive mechanisms, which echoes recent evidence revealing that memory details and the associated sense of vividness recruit different brain regions (Richter et al., 2016; Ritchey & Cooper, 2020; Thakral et al., 2019). Some accounts have proposed that the way memory details are transposed into the subjective experience of episodic memory may be dependent on the study material (Phelps & Sharot, 2008) and task context (Bastin et al., 2019; Bodner & Lindsay, 2003). For instance, the quality of some memory features rather than the total amount of retrieved memory details might determine the subjective experience associated with the remembrance of emotional material (Phelps &Sharot, 2008; Rimmele et al., 2011). 

The use of memory details to make subjective ratings might also be influenced by their relevance in the context in which the remembering experience takes place as it has been shown that young adults assigned confidence ratings that were higher when answering questions of medium difficulty that were presented after difficult rather than easy questions in a memory task (Pansky & Goldsmith, 2014; Portnoy & Pansky, 2016). There might thus be cognitive mechanisms, namely, attribution processes (i.e., memory monitoring or metacognitive heuristics) that determine how memory details and external sources of information (i.e., task context, expectations) are monitored when making subjective memory decisions (Bastin et al., 2019; Kafkas & Montaldi, 2018). The finding of our previous study that the number of retrieved episodic details predicted the intensity of subjective memory ratings regarding the number of visual details but not the vividness of older adults’ recollection seems compatible with this account (Folville, Jeunehomme, et al., 2020).

Although some perspectives or avenues for future research have already been formulated earlier in the current review, we would like to detail two lines of future research that, in our opinion, would be of interest to a wide audience.

First, future studies should seek to replicate the vividness resolution findings described here. As shown in Table 1, age differences in vividness resolution have been examined through the remembering of laboratory stimuli or recent life events, and the assumption that vividness resolution is poorer in older than in young adults is based on restricted evidence. Relatedly, the finding that the resolution of subjective memory ratings other than vividness can be spared in older adults is interesting but needs more empirical support. Moreover, future studies should further explore whether the disconnection between vividness and the number of details in aging extends to other mental representations. 

For instance, older adults produce subjective ratings regarding the sensory features of their memories that are as high (Hashtroudi et al., 1990; Shimizu et al., 2012) or higher (Luchetti & Sutin, 2018) than young adults, while they recall a low number of sensory details when remembering (Hashtroudi et al., 1990), thus suggesting that they also show reduced calibration when they judge non-visual memory representations. One may then wonder whether older adults also show poorer resolution when they make this kind of non-visual rating, a question that is still to be answered. As described earlier, older adults make vividness ratings that are higher than younger adults (De Brigard et al., 2016) but report a lower amount of details (Addis et al., 2016; Gaesser et al., 2011; Madore et al., 2014; Madore & Schacter, 2016) when they imagine possible future events. It would therefore also be of interest to examine whether young and older adults’ subjective memory vividness ratings follow the amount of imagined details to a similar extent. Older adults also produce vividness ratings that are as high as young adults when they imagine familiar places (Robin & Moscovitch, 2017). 

Critically, older adults report subjective vividness levels that are as high as young adults when they fill in mental imagery questionnaires (Folville et al., 2020; Murray & Kensinger, 2013; Pierce & Storandt, 1987; Uittenhove et al., 2015). However, whether these judgments reflect the richness of the content of what older participants have in mind has been questioned (Pierce & Storandt, 1987), but not examined yet. Answering this question is important because imagery questionnaires are often used to compare or match age groups in terms of mental imagery capacities (Henkel et al., 1998). Besides, examining this question will help to determine whether the discrepancy between vividness and objective details is due to age-related differences in monitoring processes that are specifically involved in episodic memory mechanisms or whether it stems from differences in general attribution processes engaged in the subjective assessment of various cognitive operations, including mental imagery.

Second, it would be worth investigating whether the apparent discrepancy between vividness and episodic memory content extends to other populations. In particular, Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is characterized by an impairment of the ability to remember past autobiographical events (see El Haj et al., 2015 for a review). Studies examining the effect of AD on metacognitive subjective memory judgments have focused on memory confidence. Findings from the AD literature have yielded mixed findings regarding the effect of AD on the accuracy of metacognitive confidence memory judgments with some authors revealing a decline in memory confidence resolution (Dodson et al., 2011) while others did not (Gallo et al., 2012; Moulin et al., 2003). The effect of AD on the accuracy of subjective phenomenological memory ratings has received little attention in the literature. To the best of our knowledge, only one study linked objective memory retrieval and subjective phenomenological memory ratings in AD (El Haj & Antoine, 2017). 

The results of this study revealed a weaker relation between subjective memory ratings and the specificity of remembered events in AD patients than in the control group. However, the authors of that study operationalized the relation between subjective and objective aspects of memory using a ratio between mean values of subjective ratings and memory specificity (El Haj & Antoine, 2017), so that it remains unknown whether AD patients’ trial-by-trial subjective memory judgments follow the richness of the corresponding memory representation to a similar extent as in normal aging. Besides, the authors summed all subjective ratings for their analyses instead of considering each subjective dimension of memory retrieval separately. Examining whether such a discrepancy between objective and subjective memory retrieval is evident early in the progression of the disease (even at the prodromal stage, that is, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI)) may help in better characterizing the cognitive impairments associated with AD. More broadly, examining the trial-by-trial relationship between the intensity of subjective memory vividness judgments and the corresponding memory content may be of great interest to enlighten our knowledge about the functioning of episodic memory in other disorders characterized by a diminution of the subjective sense of recollection such as autism (Cooper & Simons, 2019) or depression (Holmes et al., 2016).

Conclusion

Although older adults are usually found to assign vividness ratings that are as high or higher than young adults, we argue that this does not mean that the subjective experience of memory vividness remains unaffected in aging. It appears from converging evidence using various approaches (i.e., laboratory stimuli, recent real-life events, autobiographical memory, future thinking, or imagination) that older adults inflate the intensity of their vividness ratings but also rely on episodic details to a lesser extent than young adults to make their subjective vividness judgments. Memory vividness inflation in older adults seems to occur because of age-related differences in vividness criterion, scale interpretation, or socio-psychological factors. The reduced relation between memory vividness and objective memory measures in the older age group may be explained by the fact that retrieved memory details are used/weighted differently by young and older adults, perhaps because of age-related differences in memory attribution or monitoring processes.

The present review further emphasized the need to consider both measures of calibration and resolution when studying memory vividness or other subjective memory dimensions in the context of aging. The studies discussed here also provided evidence that the amount of available memory content is not literally transposed into a subjective sense of memory vividness but is rather weighted by attribution processes that may be sensitive to age. In this context, we recommend that future studies combine different analytic methods (i.e., calibration and resolution) and different subjective memory measures (e.g., vividness, ratings of details, and confidence) to examine age differences in the subjective experience of memory. These investigations would shed new light on age differences in episodic memory functions and could in turn be used as a window to determine the nature and the extent of the contribution of cognitive processes that are responsible for the weighting and the transposition of retrieved episodic details into a subjective sense of remembering.

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