Frontal predictors of false memory in aging

Because older adults are at an increased risk of falsely remembering past events as having happened differently than they occurred, identifying factors which protect against false memory formation in later life is a pressing concern. Prior research suggests that differences in frontally mediated processes related to retrieval monitoring and metacognition account for some of the variance in older individuals’ false memory susceptibility, with investigations demonstrating significant correlations between rates of false memory and various measures of frontal functioning and structure defined using neuropsychological assessments, structural brain scans, and functional neuroimaging methods. In the current investigation, we compared the predictive validity of five such frontal measures derived from both behavioral and neuroimaging methods within a single sample of older adults who completed tests of both semantic and perceptual false recognition (n = 71). When false memory was defined in terms of a bias-corrected measure which subtracts false alarm rates for unrelated foils from false alarm rates for related lures, frontal factors did not predict either semantic or perceptual false memory. Strikingly, Bayesian analyses indicated that the observed data were between five and seven times more likely under models including only demographic covariates compared to those that added frontal factors. Even so, some associations between frontal factors and false memory were observed in exploratory analyses which defined false memory in terms of the more frequently used, uncorrected measure of related lure false alarm rate. Implications regarding the science and measurement of false memory in aging are discussed.