Memory in adults decline because they don't imagine: study

Washington, Jan 9 (UNI) Lack of imagination in older adults linked to declining memory, research says.

Episodic memory, which represents our personal memories of past experiences, 'allows individuals to project themselves both backward and forward in subjective time,' scientists said.

Therefore, in order to create imagined future events, the individual must be able to remember the details of previously experienced ones extract various details and put them together to create an imaginary event, a process known as the constructive-episodic-simulation.

Harvard psychologists Donna Rose Addis, Alana Wong and Daniel Schacter supported the hypothesis using an adapted version of the Autobiographical Interview in which young and older participants responded to randomly selected cue words with past and future scenarios, Science Daily reported today.

When compared with young adults, the researchers found that the older adults displayed a significant reduction in the use of internal episodic details to describe both past memories and imagined future events.

The results of the study ''Age-Related Changes in Simulation of Future Events'' appear in the Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

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