KNOWING BUT NOT REMEMBERING - ADULT AGE-DIFFERENCES IN RECOLLECTIVE EXPERIENCE

Age differences in recollective experience were examined in two experi ments in which younger and older adults used their self-generated asso ciations as retrieval cues. When recalling an item, subjects indicated whether they consciously remembered its prior occurrence, or merely k new that it was presented previously. The results of both experiments showed that aging selectively impaired retention accompanied by recoll ective experience, as measured by remember responses, but had no effec ts in the absence of recollective experience, as measured by know resp onses. In Experiment 2, a similar pattern of data was obtained for a g roup of younger adults by increasing the rate of presentation at study . The results also indicated that judgments of recollective experience were related to type of encoding: Subjects who generated detailed ass ociations reported higher levels of remember responses and lower level s of know responses than did subjects who generated fewer detailed ass ociations. The results are discussed in terms of processes related to perceptual familiarity and contextual detail.