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Sketchpad Series

Aging and Temporal Order Memory in Naturalistic Events

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Yining Ding¹ (d.yining@wustl.edu), Devon R. Alperin¹, Jeffrey M. Zacks¹; ¹Washington University in St. Louis

Remembering the temporal order of past events is crucial for planning future actions adaptively. Previous studies using lab-based stimuli have found that older adults perform worse than younger adults on order memory tasks, consistent with the associative deficit hypothesis in cognitive aging. However, it remains unclear whether this deficit extends to more naturalistic scenarios, where semantic knowledge and hierarchical event structure may support encoding and retrieval of temporal relations. To address this, we are investigating age-related differences in order memory using hierarchically organized narrative stimuli depicting everyday activities, with semantic order constraints among events either on the coarse-level or on the fine-level. Participants read narratives and perform recency judgment and distance rating tasks for sentence pairs after a 20-min delay. First, we hypothesize that semantic knowledge about event order will improve both younger and older adults’ order memory performance. Second, we aim to test two competing theories about how hierarchical structure affects older adults’ temporal memory: The event distinctiveness hypothesis proposes that older adults are worse in maintaining distinct, hierarchically organized event representation than younger adults, leading to the prediction that older adults perform worse in reconstructing fine-level event order using larger temporal structure. In contrast, the specificity hypothesis proposes that older adults may retain intact gist-level associations comparable to those of younger adults, potentially eliminating age-related differences. This study has been preregistered, and data collection is currently ongoing.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Development & aging