Charitable and memorable? Probing the effects of prosocial decisions on face memory in younger and older adults

Separate lines of evidence suggest that prosocial motives are increasingly prioritized with adult age, and that episodic memory remains sensitive to motivational influences throughout the adult lifespan. The current study was designed to examine the potential interplay of prosociality and episodic memory. By pairing a financial decision-making task with an incidental face recognition task, we examined the influence of prosocial decision-making on subsequent memory for associated information (i.e. faces) in healthy younger and older adults (N = 128). During the decision-making task, participants were presented with hypothetical financial transfers from their own account to a food bank charity, which was represented by the face of a food bank client. Prosocial reward was operationalized as the amount transferred to the charity per trial. During a subsequent surprise memory test, participants were asked to discriminate between faces seen during the decision-making task and new faces. Results revealed that older adults were more satisfied by, and more likely to accept, charitable transfers than younger adults, but there were no effects of prosocial reward on face recognition performance in either age group. These findings suggest that incidental encoding may not be sensitive to transient affective states associated with prosocial decisions in younger and older adults.