Culture linked to memory strategy benefits in older adults
A memory-task experiment with 144 Taiwanese and American adults found cultural differences particularly when older participants thought about someone else.
Non-randomized trial, independent replication
Limit: Only 36 participants represented each age-and-culture group
Edited by Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News
In a memory-task experiment, 144 Taiwanese and American adults aged 18–31 or 60–82 studied object-scene pairs, with 36 participants in each age-and-culture group. They considered whether they themselves or actor and martial artist Jackie Chan would like each pair. Scenes varied in how many people they showed. Later, participants judged whether objects and scenes had originally appeared together.
Older Taiwanese adults remembered pairs with high social content better after thinking about Jackie Chan rather than themselves, a pattern not seen in younger Taiwanese adults. Older Americans’ performance stayed relatively consistent across perspectives and levels of social content, with no corresponding age-related pattern. The findings suggested cultural differences in memory for highly social information among older, but not younger, adults, particularly when thinking about another person. The authors suggested that culture may influence strategies for reducing age-related difficulties remembering associations.
Why it matters
Age-related declines in remembering connections between items raise the question of whether memory-support strategies work equally well across cultural settings.
Caveats
The age-and-culture comparison did not track memory changes within individuals or establish culture as the cause of differences. The findings do not establish benefits for other cultural groups or older adults with cognitive impairment.
The paper
Cross-cultural differences in social and self-referential memory are magnified with age
Brandeis University; National Taiwan University
Neuropsychology, Development, and Cognition Section B, Aging, Neuropsychology and Cognition, Jun 20, 2026, Open access
