Abstract
Compared to young adults, older adults are more susceptible to endorse false memories as genuine and exhibit higher confidence in their decisions to do so. While most studies to date have addressed this phenomenon in the context of episodic memory, the literature on age-differences in false recognition during short-term memory (STM) is scarce. Hence, the present study investigated age-related differences in the rate of false alarms (FA) and subsequent confidence judgments in STM. Thirty-three young and thirty-three older adults performed a visual short-term recognition memory task. In each trial, participants encoded a single abstract object, then made a “same” or “different” decision on a subsequent test, followed by a confidence judgment. We found significant age-related differences in performance as measured by the sensitivity index (d′), but not in the rate of FAs. Older adults were more confident in their erroneous recognition decisions than younger adults. The results are discussed in the context of age-differences in monitoring and associative processes.
Highlights
Both older and younger adults may forget new material as well as falsely recall information that had never occurred (Gallo, 2010)
Overall performance in the present task was assessed with a sensitivity index (d ) – an accuracy measure derived from Signal Detection Theory and calculated as d = z(Hit) – z(FA)
In contrast to previous observations in episodic memory, we did not find evidence supporting the hypothesis that older adults are more likely to commit false alarms (FA) in short-term memory (STM) compared to young adults
Summary
Both older and younger adults may forget new material as well as falsely recall information that had never occurred (Gallo, 2010). Older adults are in general more susceptible to memory errors and need more time to retrieve information (Reuter-Lorenz and Park, 2010; Devitt and Schacter, 2016). In the context of episodic memory, confidence accompanying memory decisions for false recognition of novel associations increases with age (e.g., Shing et al, 2009). This increased age-related susceptibility to high-confidence false alarms (FAs) has been primarily linked with impairments in binding and monitoring (Fandakova et al, 2013a,b). It is known that FAs are observed in STM (Atkins and Reuter-Lorenz, 2008; Abadie and Camos, 2019), but it is unclear whether age-differences in susceptibility to such errors occur in STM and. In the present study we aimed to investigate this phenomenon in a simple visual STM task
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