ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. General2026
In here and out there: Evidence that age-related differences in memory specificity are attenuated in natural social conversations.
Article in Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- In here and out there: Evidence that age-related differences in memory specificity are attenuated in natural social conversations.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2026Article
- Spontaneous Goal-Related Cognition Predicts Well-Being and Real-World Goal Attainment Across Adulthood in a Think-Aloud Study.Research square · 2026Article
- Enhanced episodic specificity and socioemotional content in older adults' everyday autobiographical thoughts.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The advantages of aging: greater stability of self-representation in older adults is linked to higher well-being.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2026Observational
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Relative to younger adults, older adults describe autobiographical event memories using less episodic detail. This outcome, although robust and highly replicated, is based on studies conducted in laboratory contexts that use unfamiliar, impersonal structured interviews-a context that may place older adults at an episodic specificity disadvantage. The present preregistered study compared how young adults (N = 24) and cognitively normal older adults (N = 50) narrate autobiographical event memories in a laboratory context, and as they went about their daily lives, using a smartphone application that unobtrusively captured their natural conversations. Findings revealed a significant Context × Age Group interaction for autobiographical memory episodic specificity. Consistent with prior research, older adults recalled less episodic detail than young adults in the laboratory context. However, older adults' episodic detail was significantly higher in event memory narratives captured in their natural conversations relative to the memories they described in the laboratory-based structured interview. In fact, young and older adults did not significantly differ in how specifically they shared event memories in their natural conversations. We found a similar outcome when we zoomed out and examined overall autobiographical thought specificity in natural daily conversations. These findings, along with additional analyses examining how well laboratory measures of autobiographical and neuropsychological functioning predict everyday autobiographical thinking, suggest that even though laboratory tasks may provide some insight into how autobiographical event memories and thoughts are shared in daily conversation, they nonetheless underestimate older adults' natural episodic specificity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.