How Do Women and Men Look at the Past? Large Scanpath in Women during Autobiographical Retrieval-A Preliminary Study.

While research has consistently demonstrated how autobiographical memory triggers visual exploration, prior studies did not investigate gender differences in this domain. We thus compared eye movement between women and men while performing an autobiographical retrieval task. We invited 35 women and 35 men to retrieve autobiographical memories while their gaze was monitored by an eye tracker. We further investigated gender differences in eye movement and autobiographical specificity, that is, the ability to retrieve detailed memories. The analysis demonstrated shorter fixations, larger duration and amplitude of saccades, and higher autobiographical specificity in women than in men. The significant gender differences in eye movement disappeared after controlling for autobiographical specificity. When retrieving autobiographical memory, female participants generated a large scan with short fixation and high saccade amplitude, while male participants increased their fixation duration and showed poorer gaze scan. The large saccades in women during autobiographical retrieval may constitute an exploratory gaze behavior enabling better autobiographical memory functioning, which is reflected by the larger number of autobiographical details retrieved compared to men.

What eye movements reveal about strategy encoding of words in younger and older adults.

The main goal of this study was to explore the organizational strategies used by younger and older adults when encoding words, using eye-tracking. Participants had to learn a set of organizable words and then a set of non-organizable words, each presented on a single display. Participants were then asked to recall the words of each set in the order in which they came to their mind. Hence, the participants' encoding strategies revealed by eye-tracking could be directly related to their subsequent memory performance. The results confirmed the detrimental impact of aging on memory and the weaker use of organizational strategies by older adults during the recall phase. The eye-tracking data showed that when they encode the words, older adults do not look at them for as long as younger adults, probably because of slower eye movements. They also revealed that compared to younger adults, older adults were much less able to adapt their word scanning strategy according to whether the words to encode were organizable or not. Finally, the relationships that were found between the recall scores and the eye-tracking data suggest that the eye movement pattern at learning can predict how people will recall the words.

Differential protective role of control and representation against age-related memory decline.

Control and representation (Craik & Bialystok, 2006, 2008) could be considered as potential cognitive resources playing a protective role against age-related memory decline. The main objective of this study was to explore whether the protective role (passive vs. active) associated with these resources varies according to the characteristics of the memory task. Young and older adults' memory performance was assessed using a cued-recall and a recognition task. Control and representation were measured, using the Excluded Letter Fluency Test and the Mill Hill vocabulary test, respectively. The results revealed that both control and representation had a significant positive impact on performance in both memory tasks. However, in the cued-recall task, age interacted only with control and not with representation level. Memory performance in this task was correlated with the control measure only for the older adults, indicating that memory decline in this task is moderated by control level. By contrast, for the recognition task, results showed that age interacted only with representation, indicating that the association between representation and recognition performance was greater for the older than the younger adults. This suggests that age-related recognition decline is moderated by representation level. These results suggest that the role played by both control and representation as protective resources against age-related memory decline depends on the task features; control would have an active protective role for cued-recall tasks, which involve more self-initiated and strategic processes, whereas representation would play this active protective role in a recognition task, which is heavily dependent upon semantic processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Optimizing memory strategy use in young and older adults: The role of metamemory and internal strategy use.

We explored whether experiencing differential efficacy of reading and generation for memory in an initial learning trial led younger and older adults to improve recall of read items in a subsequent learning trial, leading to a reduction of the generation effect. In the first trial, generation improved the memory performance of both young and older adults. However, in Trial 2, the generation effect remained significant for older adults only, confirming that they did not change the way they processed read items, unlike the young adults. The older adults were also less spontaneously aware that generation led to better memory performance in the first trial, and, in contrast to the young adults, awareness did not result in a reduction of the generation effect. Moreover, the age-related differences in generation effect reduction were mediated by an independent measure of self-reported internal strategy use. However, when an appropriate environmental support was provided between both trials, older adults improved read items recall at the second trial as well as younger ones, leading to an elimination of the generation advantage for both groups. Environmental support reduced the implication of internal strategy use in the generation effect reduction, suggesting that age-related differences in the implementation of effective encoding processes in Trial 2 would be the consequence of a metamemory deficit, and reduced capacity to self-initiate internal strategies.