Am I remembering this right?

 Perhaps the most common complaint among older adults is failing memory. But what a lot of people don’t consider (but should) is that there are two sides to every coin. There are true memories and false memories.

Things you remember incorrectly, maybe because you misattributed an effect to a wrong cause, or just associated two things together because they happened during the same time yet one didn’t necessarily cause, or even influence, the other. Turns out these kinds of false memories are much more common in older adults, as their brains age and the memory starts to fail. Let’s take a deeper look at their brains and figure out why. 

Studies using brain imaging technology found that older adults tend to have less true memory, but also more false memory. The researchers tested this through something called the Deese-Roediger McDermott (DRM) paradigm, which is basically a bunch of words that the person has to recall, or repeat again, after “studying” them. The interesting thing about these word lists is that the words are all somehow related to a “critical lure word” which is not presented in the initial “study” list.

Maybe you’re thinking, ‘well now I’m more confused.’ Let’s think of an example for a DRM word list. For a list containing “slumber, cradle, bed, night, baby;” the critical lure (not studied) might be “sleep.” Hypothetically, false memory is created if the subject (or participant) remembers the word “sleep” as a word that was “studied”. Turns out older adults are much more likely to remember these critical lures, even when they were never presented. What’s more, they are also extremely confident of their (incorrect) memory. 

One theory of memory consolidation is called fuzzy trace theory, which classifies encoded (remembered) memories into two groups: verbatim and gist memory traces. Verbatim is very specific information, and gist is, well, gist information. And within gist information is where a lot of false memories come from, since people are only remembering the basic gist of something, and not enough details to be actually correct. 

When trying to combine this theory with the experimental data, researchers start to wonder if maybe older adults make so many more false memories because they’re relying on gist memory traces, and not verbatim. So, they’re only getting the big picture of a memory and not the little details, and then they just unconsciously “fill in the gaps” to create a false memory. This would also explain the high confidence, because their memories are, at least partially, based on truth. 

While this all sounds very negative, there are also some positive aspects of this too! Researchers have also found a “practice effect” in older adults, where they are able to improve their memory for a task when it’s something they’ve done before. Specifically, older adults still have a pretty good memory (and the ability for improvement) for visuospatial skills, which are basically skills (usually movement-related) that have to deal with either vision or a sense of space. 

The DRM test is usually the only measure of false memory in peer-reviewed papers, but recently, there have been some quasi-experiments (technically, they’re experiments, but they’re also not totally valid because they weren’t done in a fully scientific setting) that introduce social methods. The end result is still the same, that older adults have more false memories than younger adults, but the procedure used in this study was socially oriented and story-based. They had a research assistant pair with a participant, whether old or young and tell them a story about another fictional person. Older adults had worse memory overall, but a little deeper look at the data told the researchers that these same people also started fabricating details of the story they were told! With high confidence, too. 

Now that you’ve reached the end of this article, I hope you all are pretty sure that age increases the formation of false memories. And even if I haven’t entirely convinced you, at least now you know about some pretty good studies where scientists have tried to answer this question. AND, you now understand an important theory about memory that might explain why older people remember more things incorrectly- the fuzzy trace theory. 

— Allie Yuxin Lin