Shift happens: Aging alters the content but not the organization of memory for complex events
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cognitive aging research has focused on comparing episodic memory accuracy between young and old adults. Less work has described qualitative shifts in how episodic memories are encoded and recalled. This is especially relevant for memories of real-world experiences, since there is immense variability in which details can be accessed and organized into a coherent narrative. To address this knowledge gap, we investigated age effects on the organization and content of memory for complex events. In two independent samples (N=45; 60), young and older adults encoded and recalled a short-movie. We scored the recollections for recall accuracy, temporal organization (temporal contiguity, forward asymmetry) and biases in memory content (perceptual, conceptual). In both samples, despite no age-effects on recall accuracy nor on metrics of organization, aging led to a stronger emphasis on conceptual content. Our results indicate that rather than a deficit, age-related differences in episodic recall reflect distinctions in what details younger and older adults assemble from the past events.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".