The impact of age on the temporal compression of daily-life events in episodic memory

Recent evidence suggests that the dynamic flow of information that constitutes daily-life events is remembered as moments of prior experience separated by temporal gaps. To date, however, how aging impacts this process of compression of past experience in episodic memory has received little attention. To examine this question, young and older adults incidentally engaged in daily-life activities while wearing a camera. Subsequently, participants were cued with pictures taken by the wearable camera and were asked to mentally relive corresponding events in as much detail as possible. Results revealed that rates of temporal compression of events when remembering were similar in young and older adults. In both groups, these rates of compression were higher when remembering goal-directed actions compared to spatial displacements. Furthermore, the amount of detail within recalled moments did not differ between age-groups. Taken together, these results support the view that episodic memories represent the unfolding of events as compressed short-time slices of past experience. Our findings also suggest that these mechanisms of compression remain stable with increasing age which highlights the importance of using ecological approaches that capture the complexity of real-life events to examine age-related changes in episodic memory