SOURCE MONITORING - ERP EVIDENCE FOR GREATER REACTIVITY TO NONTARGET INFORMATION IN OLDER ADULTS

Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) were collected concurrently with stimu lus presentation during a sourer monitoring task;. Younger adults were less likely than older adults to make source monitoring errors and th eir ERP records showed far greater discrimination between target stimu li and familiar but nontarget foils, Older adults not only made more s ourer errors but produced high amplitude late positivi ties to the non target foils even when there foils were correctly rejected. Under divi ded attention conditions, younger adults performance was similar to th at of the older adults both behaviorally and electrophysiologically. T hese data illustrate the role that attentional resources play in the a bility to inhibit response tendencies and suggest that age differences in source monitoring may be more related to attentional control than inefficiencies in the encoding oi contextual information. As well, the y suggest that the ERP late positivity may represent a more general re sponse to item salience rather than serve as an index of recollection as is the current view. (C) 1998 Academic Press.