Attention to item-specific processing eliminates age effects in false memories

One possible reason for age differences in false memory susceptibility is that older adults may not encode contextual information that allows them to distinguish between presented and non-presented but internally activated items. The present research examines whether older adults can reduce false memories when given external contextual support. In the first two experiments, semantically related lists were presented in the context of sentences that either elicited or did not elicit meanings of items that converged on a non-presented theme word. Semantically related lists were presented as the second word of cue-target pairs in Experiment 3. Results demonstrated that when gist-based processing of list items was made less accessible, older and younger adults showed similar reductions in false recall and recognition. Finally, although both groups showed reductions, measures of response latencies indicated that non-presented critical theme words were internally activated. These results have implications for encoding deficit and strategy selection as they relate to accounts of age-related deficits in memory.