Abstract
Associative memory, or the ability to remember relationships between two distinct pieces of information, declines with age. Although social information and relating information to the self at encoding (i.e., self-referencing) may attenuate these deficits, it’s unclear whether these strategies are similarly effective across cultures. We assessed this in the present study by extending a recent study that was developed and conducted with Taiwanense younger (n = 25) and older (n = 25) adults to an American sample of younger (n = 25) and older (n = 25) adults. Specifically, participants were asked to relate object-scene image pairs containing varying levels of social information (i.e., none, low and high) to themselves (i.e., self-referencing) or to a distant-other (i.e., other-referencing). We found a significant four-way interaction between age, culture, reference condition, and social information. Subsequent analyses revealed that self or other-referencing and social information differently impacted memory performance in Taiwanese older adults compared to the other groups. Their memory for high social trials benefited more from other-referencing, even compared to Taiwanese younger adults. In contrast, American older adults performed similarly across self and other-referencing and the different levels of social information, whereas American younger adults tended to benefit more from self-referencing. These findings suggest that cultural differences in memory for social information are amplified with age, especially when participants are asked to think about another person.