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Events we experience in our day-to-day lives tend to be complex – in that they are made up different kinds of content – such as sensory perceptual details (e.g., color, and shape of objects around you), event details (e.g., what happened during that event), and evaluative content (e.g., inferences you made about other people and their mental states). An important component of episodic memory encoding is the selection of these different kinds of details that are relevant to one's current goals (i.e., Conway, 2001). The ability to control which features of an experience are encoded is thought to be highly beneficial. Indeed, recent theoretical frameworks suggests that episodic memory deficits in older age are due to encoding and storing too much information (Amer et al., 2022), suggesting that inability to selectively encode goal-relevant content is detrimental. In addition, previous work suggests that older adults' cluttered memory representations can lead to reductions in memory accuracy later on and make them more susceptible to false memories (Balota et al., 1999). Based on this line of work, in the current study, we examined (1) how varying encoding goals affect the content younger and older adults remember, and (2) whether focusing on the specific aspects of an event benefits episodic memory accuracy after a delay. |
