Declines in episodic memory in older adults are typically attributed to differences in encoding strategies and/or retrieval processes. These views omit a critical factor in age-related memory differences: the nature of the representations that are formed. Here, we review evidence that older adults create more cluttered (or richer) representations of events than do younger adults. These cluttered representations might include target information along with recently activated but no-longer-relevant information, prior knowledge cued by the ongoing situation, as well as irrelevant information in the current environment. Although these representations can interfere with the retrieval of target information, they can also support other memory-dependent cognitive functions.

老年人情景记忆的下降通常归因于编码策略和/或检索过程的差异。这些观点忽略了与年龄相关的记忆差异的一个关键因素：形成的表征的性质。在这里，我们回顾了老年人比年轻人创造更混乱（或更丰富）的事件表征的证据。这些杂乱的表示可能包括目标信息以及最近激活但不再相关的信息、当前情况提示的先验知识以及当前环境中的不相关信息。尽管这些表示会干扰目标信息的检索，但它们也可以支持其他依赖于记忆的认知功能。