In this study, the authors examined the effects of aging on autobiographical memory in 180 participants by means of a new method designed to assess across 5 lifetime periods the nature of memories—that is, specificity and spontaneity—and the phenomenal experience of remembering—that is, self-perspective and autonoetic consciousness—via the field/observer and remember/know paradigms respectively. Age-related differences were found for the specificity and spontaneity of memories and the phenomenal experience of remembering. There was an increase in observer and know responses with age, but a decrease in field and remember responses and in the ability to justify them by recalling sensory–perceptive, affective, or spatiotemporal specific details. This pattern confirms the existence of a semantic–episodic dissociation in autobiographical memory in aging. Moreover, the data support the view that older participants can subjectively “travel back in time” to relive personal events in the most distant past better than those in the recent past.

Many laboratory studies have demonstrated that aging affects memory systems in different ways. Episodic memory, which refers to autobiographical memory (AM) recollected in the context of a particular time and place and with some reference to oneself as a participant in the episode, is the memory system most severely affected by aging (Craik, 2000; Moscovitch & Winocur, 1992; Nyberg et al., 2003; Nyberg & Tulving, 1996). However, AM involves one of two different kinds of knowledge pertaining to oneself, either episodic or semantic (Conway, 1996; Larsen, 1992). For example, Tulving, Schacter, McLachlan, and Moscovitch (1988) proposed distinguishing between an...