Rewriting the past: Some factors affecting the variability of personal memories

Three experiments assessed the variability of autobiographic memories and i nvestigated the effects of age of the person, the age of the memory and mem ory characteristics. Using different paradigms to examine repeated recall o f the same memories all three experiments showed that the memories of the o lder adults were more stable in terms of the content. The memories of the y ounger group showed greater variability across successive recalls. Experime nt 3 also showed that the order in which older people recalled memory detai ls was relatively consistent: younger adults showed greater variability in output order. Variability was also significantly affected by the age of the memory with older memories being less variable. No significant effects of memory characteristics (importance, emotion and frequency of rehearsal) wer e detected. Several explanations for these findings were considered. It was concluded that the personal memories of older people tend to be reproduced from a fixed precompiled representation whereas younger people's memories are dynamically reconstructed on each occasion of recall. Copyright (C) 200 0 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.