This study shows that relative to younger adults, older adults are more adversely influenced by similar items when judging a memory's source, and the phenomenal features of their correctly and incorrectly attributed memories have greater overlap. The authors argue in accordance with the source monitoring framework that this age-related impairment in source accuracy is related to processes involved in binding features into complex memories and those involved in accessing and evaluating contextual features of memories. These processes are linked to medial temporal and frontal brain regions, respectively, as evidenced by correlations in older adults between source accuracy and neuropsychological tests often used to assess medial temporal and frontal function. The results suggest that adequate feature binding is particularly important when items from different sources share similar features and access-evaluation processes are particularly important after a delay.

This study provides evidence that when source-specifying features are less available, people will rely more on their general knowledge to attribute memories to sources. Two factors (ageing and emotional self-focus) that, in general, are associated with poorer source identification performance both led to a greater reliance on stereotypes when participants attempted to remember who had said statements in a video they had watched earlier. In addition, correlations between older adults' ability to attribute statements correctly and their scores on a battery of neuropsychological tests suggests that both frontally based processes and medial temporally based processes affect accuracy of source identification, but do so to different degrees depending upon the nature of the source identification tasks.

No abstract

Participants heard words said by 2 speakers and later decided who said each word. The authors varied the perceptual distinctiveness of the speakers and the distinctiveness of the cognitive operations participants performed on the words. Relative to younger adults, older adults had significantly lower source monitoring scores when perceptual or cognitive operations conditions were similar but not when either cue was more distinctive. Combining cues did not affect source monitoring of younger adults but hurt older adults' performance relative to the distinctive perceptual condition. Evidently, older adults generate cognitive cues at the expense of encoding perceptual cues; any deficit in binding perceptual and semantic information disadvantages them more in source monitoring than in old/new recognition. There was no correlation between neuropsychological tests assessing frontal function and source monitoring in older adults.

The authors investigated the influence of test format on the source-memory performance of older adults (N = 128). Each participant viewed a picture and wrote a description of the scene. Then half of the participants (control group) read a text that accurately described the scene; the other half (misled group) read a text that contained misinformation. After writing another scene description, the participants were given a surprise memory test. Half were given a yes/no recognition test, and half were given a source-monitoring test. The misled yes/no participants mistakenly indicated more often than the control yes/no participants that misleading-text items were in the picture (suggestibility effect). There was no suggestibility effect for source-monitoring participants. The data are discussed in terms of the source monitoring framework.