Larry Jacoby's research on aging and memory: Review and commentary

This article reviews Larry Jacoby's experimental and theoretical work on age-related differences in perception and memory. Starting with a dual-processing model involving familiarity and recollection, Jacoby's work identified two broad patterns: one showing an age-related decrement in recollection but none in familiarity; the second proposing that the age-related impairment in recollection often fails to oppose the misleading effects of familiarity and habit associated with erroneous incoming information. These ideas, and the further notions of processing fluency, accessibility bias, source-constrained retrieval and capture are illustrated by an impressive array of experiments, a selection of which are described in the article. The review is accompanied by a commentary on Jacoby's views and some contrasts with findings and perspectives of the present author.