Stereotype reliance in source monitoring: Age differences and neuropsychological test correlates

This study provides evidence that when source-specifying features are less available, people will rely more on their general knowledge to attribute memories to sources. Two factors (ageing and emotional self-focus) that, in general, are associated with poorer source identification performance both led to a greater reliance on stereotypes when participants attempted to remember who had said statements in a video they had watched earlier. In addition, correlations between older adults' ability to attribute statements correctly and their scores on a battery of neuropsychological tests suggests that both frontally based processes and medial temporally based processes affect accuracy of source identification, but do so to different degrees depending upon the nature of the source identification tasks.