Mechanisms of remembering the past and imagining the future – New data from autobiographical memory tasks in a lifespan approach

We investigated the episodic/semantic distinction in remembering the past and imagining the future and explored cognitive mechanisms predicting events’ specificity throughout the lifespan. Eighty-three 6- to 81-year-old participants, divided into 5 age groups, underwent past, present and future episodic (events’ evocation) and semantic (self-descriptions) autobiographical tasks and a complementary cognitive test battery (executive functions, working and episodic memory). The main results showed age effects on episodic events’ evocation indicating an inverted U function (i.e., developmental progression from 6 to 21 years and aging decline). By contrast, age effects were slighter on self-descriptions while self-defining events’ evocation increased with age. Furthermore, age effects on episodic events’ evocation were mainly mediated by age effects on cognitive functions and personal semantics. These new findings indicate a developmental and aging episodic/semantic distinction for both remembering the past and imagining the future, and suggest that above similarities, these abilities could have a fundamentally different basis.