Aging, metamemory, and high-confidence errors: a misrecollection account.
Two experiments showed that older adults were worse than younger adults at judging the accuracy of their responses on source identification (i.e., who said what) and cued-recall tests. It is important to note that this age-related metamonitoring impairment occurred even after older and younger adults were matched on overall source accuracy and cued-recall accuracy. By contrast, older and younger adults showed comparable metamonitoring capacities when assessing the likely accuracy of old-new recognition judgments and responses to questions about general knowledge. These experiments are consistent with the misrecollection account of cognitive aging, which suggests that age-related memory impairments are due to older adults' vulnerability to making high-confidence errors when answering questions that require memory for specific details about recently learned events.
Dodson
Chad S
CS
Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4400, USA. cdodson@virginia.edu
Bawa
Sameer
S
Krueger
Lacy E
LE
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008569:Memory Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis*; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D012720:Severity of Illness Index