Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Reporting driving incidents depends on episodic memories formed at a certain time point in the past, and its retrievalwith subjective feelings. This study examined aging effects on episodic memory recollections by analyzing free writing reportsby older and young drivers. Unstructured hand-writing samples from 199 older (Mage = 69.2) long-experienced (Mdriving =43.0 years), and 299 young (Mage = 21.5) novice (Mdriving = 2.2 years) drivers were avalyzed by Latent Dirichlet Allocation.This identified a 6-topic model labeled: (1) operational failures, (2) control aspects, (3) other vehicles, (4) jump-outs, (5) trafficlights, and (6) attention. Posterior distribution analysis revealed that older drivers reported less in topics concerning own drivingoperations. In addition, older drivers less attributed these topics to self than environment relative to young drivers. The agedifferences of episodic memory retrieval for free reports and applicability of natural language processing to psychology arediscussed.