Mnemonic Effect of Imagining Loss and Gain
Creators: name: Zhang, Wanbing
Publisher: name: Brandeis University
Year: 2022
Subjects: Amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment
Loss Aversion
Memory
Object Location Memory
Source Memory
Aging
Experimental Psychology

description: Loss aversion, the propensity of people to avoid losing something more than preferring to gain something of the same amount of value, is widely studied in financial decision-making but rarely in memory research. Can thinking about losing an object help to better remember it? Based on previous research on emotion-enhanced memory, the endowment effect, and self-reference effects, we proposed that thinking about loss could well be a candidate for a memory enhancement strategy because it triggers negative emotion, poses a threat and establishes a relation to the self. According to the selective optimization and compensation theory, older adults may experience a greater reluctance to lose the resources they already have. We thus predicted that older adults would benefit more from loss imagination than younger adults due to the negative emotional impact of loss being exaggerated by their increased loss aversion. Three studies were set up to investigate this. In Experiment 1, we examined whether loss elicits a larger mnemonic benefit than gain for source memory of items (will imagining loss help younger and older adults remember items and the context under which they were encoded?). Thirty-four older and 90 younger adults viewed and processed items under a loss scenario (imagining being unable to find the item and searching for it with panic), a gain scenario (imagining purchasing the item from the store), and a possess scenario (imagining owning the item the entire time without establishing or losing the ownership as a control). Participants were later presented with old and new items and decided whether and under which scenario they saw each item. Results suggest that for older adults, loss yielded better memory than gain and possess; for younger adults, loss has a mnemonic advantage only over possess but not gain. In addition, memory performance and benefit from loss tended to be negatively correlated with level of anxiety for older adults.
description: In Experiment 2, we examined whether loss imagination can facilitate object location memory (often referred to as a type of source memory or “binding” of object and location), which is often impaired in older adults. To investigate this, 48 older and 50 younger adults viewed and processed 20 items located on an image of a shelf with a 5 x 5 array of grids under a loss scenario (imagining being unable to find the item in a particular grid on the shelf and searching for it with panic) and a gain scenario (imagining purchasing the item from the store and putting it on the shelf in a particular grid). Participants later completed a recall task in which they saw each of the previously shown items and decided which grid it belonged to. Scores for exact (answer match exactly the correct location of an object) and approximate (answer is at most one grid away from the correct location of an object) performance were calculated. Results suggest that loss yielded better object location memory than gain in both younger and older adults in approximate performance. Such advantage of loss is not present for exact memory. This suggests that the benefit of loss imagination can be extended to object location memory which persists across ages (though only under certain circumstances).
description: In Experiment 3, we explored the effect of imagining gain vs. a neutral control in patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). Imagining an event from a personal perspective has been found to be able to enhance memory for words and sentences for healthy younger adults and brain-injured patients. However, little is known about how older adults and people with age-related memory impairment respond to self-imagination. This study investigates the effect of imagining gain as a mnemonic strategy for healthy older adults and patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). Participants looked at images of objects and were asked to either imagine in rich detail buying each object in a store (the gain condition) or decide whether it can fit in an average shoe box (the control condition). Our results revealed that imagining gain shows a mnemonic advantage over the baseline strategy, though this is particularly true for healthy older adults. This finding fails to extend the conclusion of Experiment 1 (gain &gt; neutral) to aMCI patients.
description: In summary, imagining loss and gain can elicit better memory outcome compared to imagining scenarios that do not involve a change of ownership. Loss-induced memory benefits can be just as large in older adults as in younger adults, and in some cases even larger. These findings raise loss imagination as a promising memory strategy with age.