Laura Carstensen

So meeting somebody at a party, even somebody you may not particularly like, right?

could end up being an important contact five years from now when you're looking for a job.

So people are collecting, and they're very open to that.

But as time horizons are shorter, we focus.

We focus, we savor, we see better what's important and what's not.

I think this is one of the most interesting findings.

Brains do not take in information evenly, but rather goals direct our attention, goals direct our memories, goals direct cognitive resources.

And so with colleagues of mine,

Mara Mather and Susan Charles, we began to think one day about whether these changes and goals that we had documented widely in social preferences and social networks would be represented in fundamental aspects of cognitive processing.

And we began to run a study, which since has become widely replicated, called

But it was a study where we presented positive, negative, and neutral stimuli to younger, middle-aged, and older adults.

And we had them sit in front of a computer screen, and they would go through the images.

And then after they've done this viewing, tell us all the images you remember.

And what we find is that younger people remember almost the same numbers of positive and negative images.

By middle age, we see a preference in memory for the positive images, and in old age, that preference is whopping.

That is, older people are remembering almost exclusively the positive images, and they're not recalling the negative, nor the neutral ones.

And so that was the first time we'd seen this.

It was a little surprising to us because we weren't

exactly clear why people would selectively attend to positive and not negative too, because negative could be emotionally meaningful.

And we thought this was super interesting.