The self-reference effect is a well-established cognitive phenomenon in which individuals tend to remember information more effectively when it is processed in relation to themselves. Studies examining its relationship with aging have produced suggest that the self-reference effect remains robust in older adults. However, already Klein, Loftus, and Burton (1989) noted that the self-reference effect can be elicited through two distinct methods: (1) evaluating trait adjectives for self-descriptiveness and (2) retrieving autobiographical memories tied to a stimulus word. Upon reviewing existing literature, we noticed that previous research comparing the self-reference effect across age groups has predominantly utilized the self-descriptiveness task, leaving the potential impact of autobiographical memory tasks unexplored.
In this study, we sought to investigate how the self-reference effect in memory operates across age groups when using both types of manipulations. Specifically, we hypothesized that an autobiographically-laden task might give older adults a specific advantage due to their richer autobiographical knowledge base. To test this hypothesis, we conducted an experiment with 90 participants, including both younger and older adults, who were exposed to both the self-descriptiveness task and the autobiographical memory task. Our results revealed that the autobiographical task resulted in a memory advantage for older adults compared to the self-descriptiveness task. Furthermore, the age-related differences in memory performance were notably smaller in the autobiographical condition compared to the self-descriptiveness condition.