COGNITIVE REALITY MONITORING IN ADULTHOOD

This experiment assessed adult age differences for cognitive reality monitoring (attributing a memory to either an internal or external source) as a function of whether the terminal position in a sentence was completed with an externally presented or internally generated word. Older adults (mean age - 72.3 years) made slightly more accurate attributions than younger adults (mean age - 18.5 years) even though the younger adults accurately recognized a higher proportion of target words than older adults. Subjects were able to discriminate either type of target from distractor, but when an attribution error was made, it was made in favor of external origin. In this experiment, older adults' common complaints about memory source confusions seem without firm basis. Results suggest that the manner in which younger and older adults process and discriminate between sources of information is invariant across the life span.