• M Abram, L Picard, B Navarro, and P Piolino.
• Paris Descartes University, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France; Institute of Psychology, Memory and Cognition Laboratory, Boulogne Billancourt, France; Inserm U 894, Psychiatry and Neurosciences Center, Paris, France.
• Conscious Cogn. 2014 Oct 1; 29: 76-89.

AbstractWe investigated the episodic/semantic distinction in remembering the past and imagining the future and explored cognitive mechanisms predicting events' specificity throughout the lifespan. Eighty-three 6- to 81-year-old participants, divided into 5 age groups, underwent past, present and future episodic (events' evocation) and semantic (self-descriptions) autobiographical tasks and a complementary cognitive test battery (executive functions, working and episodic memory). The main results showed age effects on episodic events' evocation indicating an inverted U function (i.e., developmental progression from 6 to 21years and aging decline). By contrast, age effects were slighter on self-descriptions while self-defining events' evocation increased with age. Furthermore, age effects on episodic events' evocation were mainly mediated by age effects on cognitive functions and personal semantics. These new findings indicate a developmental and aging episodic/semantic distinction for both remembering the past and imagining the future, and suggest that above similarities, these abilities could have a fundamentally different basis.Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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