Abstract
Subjective vividness and emotional salience of memory are relatively preserved in aging, regardless of objective memory decline. Nuances in memory strategy, like older adults' reliance more on semantic details and less on perceptual information, may contribute to lower memory precision but higher accounts of memory vividness, which can be enhanced by emotional salience. It remains unclear to what degree low-level continuous stimulus features of memory quality are altered by emotion in aging and whether these alterations contribute to subjective memory vividness. Here, we tested the impact of older age on emotional memory quality and vividness using an established emotional memory task in a sample of older (
= 37) and young adults (
= 34). Participants studied emotionally negative and neutral images that varied in visual salience (color saturation and luminance) and subsequently reconstructed the images' visual salience from memory and rated their memory vividness. Results demonstrated that older adults, like young adults, show systematic biases in visual memory-they remember stimuli as less visually salient than originally perceived, though older adults were less precise in these judgments compared with young adults. Further, associations between subjective memory vividness and objective memory qualities were reduced in older adults. Lastly, age-by-emotion interactions supported accounts that memory benefits for negative emotional stimuli are reduced in older adults. These findings provide insight into the visual qualities contributing to subjective memory vividness in aging and suggest that aging is associated with diminished memory precision but preserved subjective vividness for negative stimuli. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).