Mechanisms of episodic simulation of helping behaviour in younger and older adults

Abstract

The ability to recall the past (i.e., episodic memory) and simulate hypothetical events (i.e., episodic simulation) are intrinsically linked, and individuals with diminished episodic memory abilities show similar deficits when imagining potential future events. For instance, age-related declines in episodic memory are mirrored in older adults’ simulations of future events, such that older adults produce fewer episodic details, and more semantic information, than younger adults when both remembering the past and imagining the future. Despite such deficits, recent research suggests that older adults can successfully imagine future scenarios in which they help people in need; however, these findings are limited, and the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. The present thesis examines whether episodic simulation of future helping behaviours differs between younger and older adults under several conditions. Chapter 2 demonstrates that episodic simulation of helping behaviour increases younger and older adults’ willingness to help even in the highly novel scenarios posed by the pandemic. Participants relied more on non-episodic details when imagining COVID-related scenarios for which they had limited similar experiences. Relatedly, in Chapter 3, both episodic simulation and similarity to one’s personal experiences increase willingness to help and phenomenological experiences, but the mechanisms differ between younger and older adults. Scene vividness and perspective-taking mediated the relationship between situation similarity and willingness to help in younger adults, but only perspective-taking had an indirect effect in older adults. Finally, Chapter 4 suggests that time-spent-imagining does not affect older adults’ ability to simulate future helping behaviours. However, time-spent-imagining did affect the number of internal details produced, but the proportion of internal details (correcting for total details produced) was not affected by time. As such, the often-used metric of a count of episodic details alone may not be the best measure to assess episodic simulation abilities in younger and older adults. Taken together, the present studies suggest that episodic simulation of helping similarly increases younger and older adults’ willingness to help, but the underlying mechanisms likely differ across the lifespan. Additionally, both subjective and objective measures of simulated events must be examined to accurately assess simulation abilities across the lifespan.