Age-related changes in susceptibility to false memories in different tasks

We become increasingly susceptible to various false memories as we age. Recent work has shown that in younger adults, associations between false memories in different paradigms are weak or non-existent. However, it is unknown whether the relationship between false memories changes for older adults. In two Experiments, we assessed false memories in younger and older adults elicited by three established false memory paradigms: the misinformation paradigm, the DRM (Deese-Roediger-McDermott) paradigm, and the memory conjunction tasks. We replicated previous findings of a lack of relationship between false memories arising from these tasks in younger adults, with the exception of raw false alarm rates in the DRM and memory conjunction tasks. In a novel finding, we extended this lack of relationship to older adults. In both Experiments, we observed a unique relationship between different types of false memories for older adults with higher compared with lower executive functioning capacity, which might reflect different recruitment of compensatory strategies. On the whole, our results concur with prior reports that different cognitive mechanisms underpin false memories in different paradigms, and care must be taken when generalizing results across memory paradigms, regardless of age.