Aging and source monitoring: Cognitive processes and neuropsychological correlates.

Abstract

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.

The effects of verbalization on face recognition in young and older adults

“…Older adults were more likely to pick an innocent foil than were younger adults. Currently the most likely explanation for this is age related deficits in context recollection and source memory (Chalfonte and Johnson, 1996;Henkel et al, 1998;Jennings and Jacoby, 1997). These processes are critical in an eyewitness context where when someone makes a positive identification they are saying they have previously seen the face in a specific context.…”

Episodic memory decay along the adult lifespan: A review of behavioral and neurophysiological evidence

“…These studies have tested diverse contexts: the modality, visual or auditory, in which stimuli were previously presented (McIntyre and Craik, 1987), who presented the information (Schacter et al, 1991), whether the stimuli were previously perceived or imagined (Henkel et al, 1998), the voice that presented the information (Glisky et al, 2001), if the participant asked for, answered or listened to certain information (Brown et al, 1995), or in which room, color or set of stimuli were the items previously presented (Spencer and Raz, 1994). All of these experiments confirmed that older adults perform poorer in the source-memory task than younger adults.…”

The effects of frontal lobe functioning and age on veridical and false recall

“…Degradation in the frontal lobes occurs with aging (Anderson & Craik, 2000;West, 1996), and the frontal lobes are particularly susceptible to volumetric reduction as a person ages (Buckner, 2004;Raz, 2000). Because the frontal lobes are implicated in processes such as source monitoring (Henkel, Johnson, & De Leonardis, 1998), declines in frontal lobe functioning might reduce an older adult's ability to avoid false memories. A corollary of this idea is that older adults who do not show age-related frontal deficits may exhibit memory performance similar to that of younger adults.…”