Memory is well known to decline over the course of healthy aging. However, memory is not a monolith and draws from different kinds of representations. Historically, much of our understanding of age-related memory decline stems from recognition of isolated studied items. In contrast, real-life events are often remembered as narratives, and this kind of information is generally missed in typical recognition memory studies. Here, we designed a task to tax mnemonic discrimination of event details, directly contrasting perceptual and narrative memory. Older and younger adults watched an episode of a television show and later completed an old/new recognition test featuring targets, novel foils, and similar lures in narrative and perceptual domains. While we observed no age-related differences on basic recognition of repeated targets and novel foils, older adults showed a deficit in correctly rejecting perceptual, but not narrative, lures. These findings provide insight into the vulnerability of different memory domains in aging and may be useful in characterizing individuals at risk for pathological cognitive decline.

中文翻译：

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衰老会影响感知而非叙事事件细节的记忆

众所周知，随着健康的衰老过程，记忆力会下降。然而，记忆并不是一块巨石，而是从不同种类的表征中汲取灵感。从历史上看，我们对与年龄相关的记忆衰退的大部分理解源于对孤立研究项目的认识。相比之下，现实生活中的事件通常以叙述的形式被记住，而这种信息在典型的再认记忆研究中通常会被遗漏。在这里，我们设计了一项任务来对事件细节的记忆辨别征税，直接对比感知和叙述记忆。老年人和年轻人观看了一集电视节目，随后完成了一项新/旧识别测试，测试对象包括叙事和感知领域的目标、新颖的箔纸和类似的诱饵。虽然我们在重复目标和新箔的基本识别方面没有观察到与年龄相关的差异，老年人在正确拒绝感性而非叙事的诱惑方面表现出缺陷。这些发现提供了对不同记忆域在衰老过程中的脆弱性的深入了解，并可能有助于表征有病理性认知衰退风险的个体。