Suppressing False Recognition in Younger and Older Adults: The Distinctiveness Heuristic ☆ ☆☆ ★

False recognition can occur at high levels after participants study lists of associated words and are tested with semantically related lures. Israel and Schacter (1997) reported that robust false recognition effects are reduced substantially when young adults also study pictures representing each associate. In Experiment 1, we found that older adults, who have previously shown increased susceptibility to false recognition of semantic associates, also exhibit substantial suppression of false recognition after pictorial encoding. In Experiment 2, we tested the hypothesis that suppression effects in Experiment 1 are attributable to the operation of what we call adistinctiveness heuristic:a response mode in which participants demand access to detailed recollections to support a positive recognition decision. Consistent with this hypothesis, we found that when encoding conditions were manipulated to render a distinctiveness heuristic ineffective, false recognition suppression after pictorial encoding was eliminated in younger and older adults.

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