Suppressing false recognition in younger and older adults: The distinctiveness heuristic

False recognition can occur at high levels after participants study lists o f associated words and are tested with semantically related lures. Israel a nd Schacter (1997) reported that robust false recognition effects are reduc ed substantially when young adults also study pictures representing each as sociate. In Experiment I, we found that older adults, who have previously s hown increased susceptibility to false recognition of semantic associates, also exhibit substantial suppression of false recognition after pictorial e ncoding. In Experiment 2, we tested the hypothesis that suppression effects in Experiment 1 are attributable to the operation of what we call a distin ctiveness heuristic: a response mode in which participants demand access to detailed recollections to support a positive recognition decision. Consist ent with this hypothesis, we found that when encoding conditions were manip ulated to render a distinctiveness heuristic ineffective, false recognition suppression after pictorial encoding was eliminated in younger and older a dults, (C) 1999 Academic Press.