Monitoring and suggestibility to misinformation: Adult age-related differences

We compared young and older adults' source monitoring performance on an explicit source identification test using the misinformation paradigm. Several age-related differences in source memory were demonstrated: (a) older adults were more likely than were young adults to say that they saw information that was actually only suggested to them; (b) older adults were more confident in their false memories than were young adults; (c) older adults were less confident in their accurate memory for the source of information than were young adults. Together, the data suggest that older adults either lacked or failed to use helpful diagnostic source information (e.g. perceptual details or temporal information), and that their confidence in their false memories reflected an over-weighting of semantic information. Copyright (C) 2002 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.