Abstract:

Three experiments investigate the influence of a stringent decision criterion upon the abilities of young and elder people in discriminating between "old" and "critical" stimulus in the DRM experimental paradigm. In Experiment 1 we changed the DRM paradigm by modifying the classical old/new recognition task (implies a loose decision criteria) into a source-monitoring task (implies a stringent decision criteria). This manipulation reduced the rate of false recognition in younger people. In Experiment 2 we applied the same manipulation to older people, and found that it had no effect on the recognition rate of critical stimuli. In Experiment 3 we discriminated between perceptual and spatial-temporal features, both used in source monitoring, and modified the DRM paradigm in a manner that it includes perceptual features. Such a manipulation reduced the rate of false recognition of older people. Based on this data we conclude that source monitoring reduces the false recognition of young people. In the case of older subjects, this manipulation is effective only in the cases when the situation includes perceptual details. They have a specific deficit in the recollection of spatial-temporal features of the stimuli presentation context.

Keywords: false memory, source monitoring, frontal lobe, aging