Age differences in binding actors and their actions in memory: Implications for eyewitness memory

Everyday individuals experience problems in accurately remembering who did what in an event. In order to have an accurate memory for an event of this type, an individual needs to remember the person who performed the action, the action itself, and the pairing of these two pieces of information. If these pieces of information are not bound together correctly, the end result is an inaccurate memory for an event. This study examined the ability of young and older adults to bind people and their actions together in memory. Though both age groups were more likely to falsely recognize novel combinations of familiar actors and actions than they were to falsely recognize novel actions, the older participants were even more likely to falsely recognize these novel combinations. The misbinding of actors and actions may thus contribute to the problem of mistaken eyewitness identification.