Knowing What Others Know: Younger and Older Adults' Perspective-Taking and Memory for Medication Information

Health-related information can be important to communicate and remember, but we may not understand our own or others' memory abilities. In this study, younger and older adults estimated their performance before and after a cued-recall memory task in which they studied medication : side effect pairs. Participants also estimated the performance of a peer their own age, a medical student, and a person in the other age group (i.e., younger adults estimated older adults' performance and vice versa). In Experiment 1, participants completed four study-test cycles, each with new pairs. In Experiment 2, the same pairs were presented throughout. Overall, participants initially overestimated their memory performance, but after the task, several judgments were closer to participants' actual performance and that of their peers. Thus, people may not initially have accurate representations of how they and others remember health-related information, but these misconceptions may be ameliorated by testing and task experience.