Aging can spare recollection-based retrieval monitoring: the importance of event distinctiveness

The authors investigated two retrieval-monitoring processes. Subjects studied red words and pictures and then decided whether test words had been studied in red font (red word test) or as pictures (picture test). Memory confusions were lower on the picture test than on the red word test, implicating a distinctiveness heuristic. Memory confusions also were lower when study formats were mutually exclusive (the same item was never studied as both a red word and a picture), compared with a nonexclusive condition, implicating a recall-to-reject process. When the to-be-recollected events were pictures, older adults used each monitoring strategy as effectively as did younger adults.