Formal modeling in research on episodic memory and aging

Julia Spaniol and Ute J. Bayen. Published in Volume 46, Issue 4 (2004).

Cognitive aging has drawn steady attention for roughly four decades, and within it, the way episodic memory shifts with age has been one of the central puzzles researchers keep returning to. The explanations offered for those age-related differences rest on an enormous body of work. Almost all of it is empirical. What that literature has rarely leaned on is formal models of how memory actually operates.

Our position is that formal modeling deserves a much larger role here. The problems this field faces, both theoretical and methodological, are peculiar to it, and models give researchers a way to confront those problems with some precision rather than relying on verbal theories alone.

To make the case, we survey formal models that speak to the questions at the heart of memory-and-aging work. Three of those questions stand out. One concerns how encoding and retrieval change with age. A second concerns memory for contextual detail, the information that surrounds an event rather than the event itself, and how that fares as people grow older. The third concerns the point where remembering meets judgment and decision making, since what someone recalls and how they then act on it are not the same process.

We close by pointing to parts of the field where the modeling work has barely started and where a more formal treatment could pay off.