When True Memories Suppress False Memories: Effects of Ageing
Elizabeth Kensinger1999, Cognitive Neuropsychology
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Abstract
After studying a list of words that are all associated to a nonpresented target word, people often falsely recall or recognise the nonpresented target. Previous studies have shown that such false memories are greatly reduced when study lists are presented and tested several times compared to a single study/test trial. We report that older adults, who are sometimes more susceptible to memory distortions than are young adults, failed to exhibit any reduction in false recall or false recognition after five study/test trials compared to a single trial. By contrast, younger adults showed robust suppression of false memories after five study/test trials compared to a single trial. These results are consistent with the idea that older adults rely on memory for the general features or gist of studied materials, but tend not to encode or to retrieve specific details of individual items.
Key takeaways
- But a growing body of evidence converges on the conclusion that, compared to younger adults, older adults sometimes show equal or greater levels of false recall and false recognition of items not previously studied.
- As Fig. 1 shows, although older and younger adults began with identical false recall rates, the young adults sharply reduced their false recall responses across trials, from .38 on Trial 1 to .14 on Trial 5.
- However, although younger and older adults were reasonably well equated on Trial 1 with regard to their overall false recognition rates, young adults showed a significant decrease in false recognition rates across trials [F(4,95) = 13.99, MSe = 0.048, P < .0001], whereas elderly adults did not [F(4,95) < 1].
- Consistent with our major hypothesis, the trends for false recognition paralleled those in Experiment 1: Young adults reduced false recognition responses across trials whereas elderly adults did not.
- Both experiments showed clearly that elderly adults continued to make similar levels of false recall and false recognition responses across trials, whereas younger adults showed sharp reductions in both types of false memories.
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