False recognition effects in young and older adults' memory for text passages.
Recent work has demonstrated an age-related increase in susceptibility to illusory memories; specifically, older adults make more false recognition responses to unstudied items when such items are semantically related to studied items. The majority of studies have examined false recognition for semantically associated words; the current study extends that previous work by examining false recognition effects for schematized story actions. In two experiments young and older adults studied schematized stories and were later given a recognition test for studied and unstudied story actions. Our results indicate that both age groups produced robust false recognition effects, but older adults were not more susceptible to these effects. These results suggest there are limits to the range of circumstances that yield age differences in illusory memories.
Psychology Department, Saint Louis University, Missouri, USA. lavoiedj@slu.edu
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D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007088:Illusions; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning; D010469:Perceptual Distortion; D012016:Reference Values