Nonepisodic autobiographical memory details reflect attempts to tell a good story.

A persistent finding in the autobiographical memory (AM) literature is that older adults report more nonepisodic (or generalized/semantic) information than young adults. Since studies are usually focused on memory for episodic (or specific) autobiographical events, the reason for the age difference in nonepisodic AM remains understudied. This experiment investigated whether the higher rate of nonepisodic AM in older adults reflects (a) a difference incommunicative preferences or (b) cognitive decline, by way of either an inhibition deficit or as a means of compensating for a deficit in episodic AM. A sample of 54 young (