Thirty older women (M = 73.7, SD = 7.4 years) and thirty younger women(M =
20.3, SD = 1.4 years) heard audiotaped medication instructions, judged the
overall memorability of the instructions, and made ratings of the memorabil
ity of the specific aspects of the instructions. Participants were given a
structured recall task after a 24-hour delay. Recall performance was measur
ed, and the accuracy of ease-of-recall ratings was assessed in multiple way
s. Younger adults were superior overall at recalling medication instruction
s, and at predicting absolute memorability. However, the two age groups did
not differ when epistemic awareness was assessed using a relative predicti
on accuracy measure.