Subjective Cognitive Decline Is Associated with Impaired Memory for New Associations More Than for Gist

Poster Session F - Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Madeline A. Sullivan¹ (sullivanma@uchicago.edu), Carina C. Samson¹, David A. Gallo¹; ¹University of Chicago

We examined the extent to which subjective cognitive decline (SCD) in older adults was associated with impaired episodic memory. SCD has been proposed as an early indicator of Alzheimer’s disease, and based on previous work, we hypothesized that SCD would be associated with more rapid forgetting in an episodic memory task (i.e., accelerated long-term forgetting; ALF). Importantly, prior evidence linking SCD to ALF has focused largely on episodic memory for verbal stimuli (e.g., individual words or short stories), leaving open the question of whether this pattern generalizes to other forms of episodic memory. To address this, we compared memory performance between older adults with and without SCD across short (20 minutes) and long (24 hour) retention intervals. We used two memory tasks: a paired-associates task assessing episodic memory for newly formed associations, and a DRM false recognition task assessing episodic memory for semantically associated word categories. Results revealed increased forgetting at the longer delay, with lower performance in individuals with SCD, especially in high-confidence responding. However, an unexpected pattern emerged on the DRM task. Participants without SCD exhibited greater forgetting of gist-based information than those with SCD, inconsistent with the hypothesis that SCD would be associated with accelerated forgetting. These findings suggest that previously reported associations between SCD and ALF may be specific to episodic memory for individual words or details like newly learned associations and may not generalize to episodic memory for gist. This distinction has important implications for the development of sensitive cognitive markers of preclinical cognitive decline.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Development & aging