GIST-BASED FALSE RECOGNITION OF PICTURES IN OLDER AND YOUNGER ADULTS

Three experiments examined the recognition performance of older (60-75 yrs) and younger (17-25 yrs) adults for detailed colored pictures of objects as ri function of whether the targets and lures were from prev iously studied categories or were unrelated (noncategorized) items. If participants had studied many exemplars from a category, they often f alsely recognized lures from those categories; this false recognition effect was especially pronounced in older adults. Older and younger pa rticipants showed equivalent correct recognition of large-category tar gets, but older adults showed significantly reduced recognition of unr elated targets, suggesting that older adults were relying on the gener al conceptual and/or perceptual similarity (''gist'') of study and tes t items in making their recognition decisions. The results extend the domain of robust false recognition to detailed color pictures and demo nstrate that. particularly in older adults, false recognition sometime s involves similarity-based errors rather than source confusions regar ding whether specific lure items had been presented or were generated spontaneously during the study task, (C) 1997 Academic Press.