False Memory In Older Adults

This article by Smith et al., 2015, tests how pictures can have an effect on false memories especially in older adults. The researchers were interested in why pictures can decrease false memories in older adults but why visual words do not decrease false memories in older adults as they do in younger adults. In this study there were two experiments with both older and young adults. The first experiment tests whether young adults would have higher false recall being presented with sounds of words rather than being presented with a visual list of words, and whether there will be no difference in false recall for older adults being presented with a visual list of words rather than the sounds. In the second experiment tests whether there is an …show more content…
Further more, there was no significant difference between memory performance of older adults and young adults in the divided attention condition when presented with items only heard or heard with the visual words. However, older adults performed just as well as younger adults in the full attention condition when presented with pictures. This indicates that older adults are not able to encode sensory details of processing as well as young adults because of resource limitation, and as a result this effects their ability to recall information. This finding supports that pictures and words have different effects on older adults’ false memory that are due to differences in encoding information that helps identify the …show more content…
One of the limitations of the study was the amount of time that participants had while studying the words and for the final recall. Participants only got 3 seconds to encode each of the items, and had 2.5 minutes for the final recall. Another limitation would be whether participants were focussed while studying the word. Other limitations could be due to the sample size in study 2 had only 30 older adult participants and the study design in study 2 because adults were not assigned in the divided attention condition. Finally, participants could of guessed on the recall test. Despite these contradictions and limitations, this study relates to information that was learned in class about false memories. In class, it was more focussed on how people develop false memories rather than how people can reduce them. It is interesting how images of words compared to seeing a words or hearing a word is most effective in reducing false memories. This gives some insight on how pictures may be a predictor at improving false memories. It is also interesting how older adults are more prone to false