Scientists' understanding of the aging brain has long led to the conclusion that younger adults can recall their life memories with more specific detail than their older peers.

This notion has been reinforced for ages in laboratory research, which often involves interviewing participants about their recollections.

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But by relying on smartphone apps to get feedback from participants in real-world settings, University of Arizona psychologists saw older adults recall more vivid, specific memories than laboratory research has suggested is the case. In fact, in some respects, older adults' recollections were richer in detail than their younger fellow counterparts, opposite to that observed in laboratory research. 

The findings come from two papers in separate journals: The latest has been accepted by the American Psychological Association's Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and follows similar findings by the same team of U of A psychologists that were published in January in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While the studies' findings do question scientists' basic assumptions of cognitive aging, the researchers said they also show that using methods outside the lab will lead to a more nuanced understanding of cognitive aging. That could open the door, they added, to more effective prediction, prevention and treatment tools for disorders such as dementia.

"If we paint a better, more precise picture of what cognitively healthy aging looks like, then we might be able to more precisely draw conclusions and answer questions related to what is 'healthy' versus 'non-healthy' aging at a greater scale," said Vannia Puig Rivera, lead author of the paper that published in January.

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Puig Rivera, a Ph.D. student in the U of A Department of Psychology, in the College of Science, worked with Jessica Andrews-Hanna and Matthew Grilli, associate professors and co-authors on both new papers. The second paper is led by Katie McVeigh, a clinical psychology Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology. Both studies were completed as part of $4.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health that Andrews-Hanna and Grilli co-lead.

Both studies provided further evidence that older adults engage less frequently with their memories or self-related thoughts, but when they do, they imagine richer, more specific details, said Andrews-Hanna, who also directs the Neuroscience of Emotion and Thought Lab, or NET Lab, which developed the smartphone app used in the experiment published in January.

Researchers are still working to understand what a decline in how often memories come to mind might say about what happens to our memories as we age.

"While aspects of these findings could be consistent with a decline-oriented view of aging, we might actually be tapping into something much more optimistic about aging than often appreciated – a story of efficiency, connection, wellbeing and wisdom," Andrews-Hanna said.

Smartphones as mobile laboratories

Both studies relied on smartphone applications to study cognitive aging in ways that can't be replicated in labs. 

Puig Rivera's study, from January, used an app called Mind Window, which is free for anyone to download and use on both iOS and Android smartphones; 4,847 of the app's anonymized registered users were participants in this study. Their ages ranged from 18 to 89 years old. The app sends push alerts to users at random times every day asking them to fill out surveys about their thoughts when receiving the notification. The questions asked for details such as the memories' specificity and vividness, the general emotion it evoked, and who or what the memory was about.

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McVeigh's study relied on an app called the Electronically Activated Recorder, or EAR, also developed at the University of Arizona by co-author and U of A professor of psychology Matthias Mehl. After users agree to the terms of the study, the app uses the smartphone microphone to record whatever it picks up during everyday conversations and other social encounters. Researchers used EAR to make recordings with 74 participants whose ages ranged from 18 to 81, then culled through the audio files listening for moments when participants are sharing memories in their social conversations.

"We were very excited to find that with the EAR smartphone app, we were not only able to capture folks sharing memories in their everyday conversations, but we were also able to see that older adults reflect on their personal past in a way that differs from what we typically see in the lab," McVeigh said.

Both studies also asked participants to sit for more traditional, laboratory-based autobiographical interviews that have long been common in psychological research. The publication involving Mind Window included a second study in which the authors interviewed 217 participants; the EAR study also interviewed all 74 participants. This approach allowed researchers to compare what they found using their novel collection methods compared to the traditional interview approach, Puig Rivera said.

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In Puig Rivera's study using Mind Window, "we found a reversal in the typical pattern where older adults did report that they experience their past thoughts with more specificity and vividness compared to their younger counterparts," Puig Rivera added. In McVeigh's study using the EAR, the researchers found that older adults, but not the younger participants, described their memories more vividly in their daily social conversations than they did in the laboratory – a result that reinforces Puig Rivera's findings and raises questions about the conclusions drawn from laboratory research focused on cognitive aging. 

The studies are not about peoples' ability to accurately recall their memories as they age, the researchers said. Rather, the research was more about how specific their recollection was, accurate or not, Grilli said.

"If you think about what makes a good story or book, we get a lot from being able to visualize the story that's being told to us, to feel the emotion of it and to really feel like you're there," he said. "We had this impression that older adults were struggling to do this relative to younger people, based on the way we studied their memories in the lab and how we scored them."

"But our data say that older adults are actually quite well equipped to bring memories to mind in a vivid way," Grilli added, "when we assess memory in everyday, familiar environments."