False Recognition Effects in Young and Older Adults' Memory for Text Passages

Recent work has demonstrated an age-related increase in susceptibility to illusory memories; specifically, older adults make more false recognition responses to unstudied items when such items are semantically related to stud-ied items. The majority of studies have examined false recognition for semantically associated words; the current study extends that previous work by examining false recognition effects for schematized story actions. In two experi-ments young and older adults studied schematized stories and were later given a recognition test for studied and un-studied story actions. Our results indicate that both age groups produced robust false recognition effects, but older adults were not more susceptible to these effects. These results suggest there are limits to the range of circum-stances that yield age differences in illusory memories. ALTHOUGH memory is usually accurate, people are sus-l \ ceptible to memory distortions and illusions under a variety of conditions (for reviews, see Roediger, 1996, or Schacter, 1995). Recent work suggests that older adults may be particularly susceptible to distortions and illusions of memory; some examples are false fame judgments (Dywan & Jacoby, 1990), false recollection of event