DECEIVING THE ELDERLY: EFFECTS OF ACCESSIBILITY BIAS IN CUED-RECALL PERFORMANCE

Two experiments examined age-related differences in a misinformation paradigm. Young and elderly participants studied a list of related word pairs (e.g. bed sheet) and were then given a cued-recall test (“bed s_ee_” presented as cues for recall of “sheet”). A ‘prime’ stimulus was presented briefly before each test trial. On congruent trials the prime was the target word from study (sheet) whereas on incongruent trials the prime was a related word that was a plausible response but not the target (sleep). On baseline trials, the prime was a string of ampersands. When forced to respond (Expt. 1), both young and elderly participants demonstrated a bias to respond with the prime word, although the elderly showed a larger false memory effect as measured by higher false recalls on incongruent relative to baseline trials. When given the option to pass (Expt. 2), elderly participants continued to exhibit a large bias toward the prime word whereas young participants tended to pass when they were unable to recall th...