Cross-cultural differences in social and self-referential memory are magnified with age
Iva Dujmic, Isu Cho, Angela Gutchess, Yu-Ling Chang · 2026
Read Cross-cultural differences in social and self-referential memory are magnified with age by Iva Dujmic, Isu Cho, Angela Gutchess, Yu-Ling Chang (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13333165.txt.
Description
Iva Dujmic and colleagues compared memory strategies across cultures and ages in a 2026 experiment with Taiwanese and American adults. Linking information to oneself or to other people can blunt age-related memory decline, but cultures weigh social and self information differently.
Participants learned object and scene pairs carrying none, low, or high social content, judging them either against themselves or against a distant other person. Among Taiwanese participants, thinking of another person boosted older adults' memory for highly social pairs relative to younger adults, repeating an earlier finding. Americans showed no such pattern: older adults performed steadily across both judging styles and all social levels. The authors conclude that cultural gaps in memory for social material widen with age, especially under other-focused thinking, so memory support may need cultural tailoring.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Iva Dujmic, Isu Cho, Angela Gutchess, Yu-Ling Chang |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 41101 |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |