Adult Age Differences in Event Memory for Events

In order to remember an event, one must remember
the participants in the event, the actions that are
performed, and which people performed which actions.
Often people make binding errors in memory in
which they remember the people and the actions, but
they incorrectly remember one person as the person
who performed an action that was actually performed
by someone else. Half of the participants in our study
saw a series of actions with each action performed by
one of two actors. The other half of the participants
saw each action performed by a different actor. We
found that older adults were more likely to make binding
errors than were younger adults. Younger adults
were equally likely to make binding errors in the two
conditions. Older adults, however, made many fewer
binding errors when they saw only two actors during
encoding than when they saw many actors during encoding.