The literature reports an increased production of false memories with advancing age (Dehon & Brédart, 2004; Norman & Schacter, 1997; Schacter, Koutstaal, & Norman, 1997; Taconnat & Rémy, 2006). False memories are memories of events that never happened, or which include distorsions in comparison of what have really been experienced or perceived (Roediger & McDermott, 1995). In order to evaluate the emergence of this phenomenon in laboratory situation, researchers use the DRM paradigm (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995). This paradigm is a memory task which have the characteristic to create spontaneous false memories.
Several theories explain the emergence of false memories in experimental task as the DRM paradigm, especially the activation-monitoring theory (Roediger, Balota, & Watson, 2001). Activation-monitoring theory suggests that a deficit of source monitoring processes is one of the reason which explain this increase of false recall in the DRM paradigm. Indeed, the source monitoring processes are all of the cognitive processes required to recognize the origin of an information. Thus, when a person is not able to determine if an information comes from an internal or an external source, she is more likely to create false memories. By the way, a lot of studies bring out the fact that monitoring processes are very vulnerable to aging, which can explain the increased production of false memories with advancing age (Balota, Dolan, & Duchek, 2000; Dehon & Brédart, 2004; Hashtroudi, Johnson, & Chrosniak, 1990).
Newly, the involvement of executive functions and inhibition in monitoring processes has been highlighted (El Haj & Allain, 2012; Colombel, Tessoulin, Gilet, & Corson, 2016). In fact, the episodic memory decline and the increase of false memories in aging can stem from the deterioration of prefrontal cortex and related executive functions, in so far as wholeness executive functions are involved in efficient use of encoding and retrieval strategies (Devitt & Schacter, 2016; Gallo, 2010; Isingrini & Taconnat, 2008; Moscovitch & Winocur, 1995). Furthermore, inhibition function seems to be the executive function which is more bound to lower capacities in source memory (El Haj & Allain, 2012), thereby contributing to increase false memories.
Therefore, the main goal of this study was to investigate how false memories, source memory and inhibition are connected in normal aging. To this end, the performance of an experimental group of older adults (18 to 35 years old) in the DRM paradigm, inhibition and source memory tasks were compared with those of a control group of young adults (67 to 82 years old). On the one hand, the DRM paradigm is used to evaluate false memories production in every group. On the other hand, few tasks are intended to check out the executive level and inhibition capacities of participants : the PASAT (Gronwall, 1977) and the Stroop Grefex (Roussel & Godefroy, 2008). A memory source task is also proposed in order to estimate their monitoring processes abilities.
Regarding results, this study does not allow us to draw conclusions. Indeed, although our findings supports a deficit of source monitoring processes involved in the increase of false memories with advancing age, a direct influence of inhibition on false memories or source memory capacity is not demonstrated yet.
The words I have learned :
To stem from : provenir de, être dû à
Newly : récemment
Wholeness : l’intégrité, l’intégralité
In so far as : dans la mesure où
To be bound : être lié
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