Age, criterion flexibility, and associative recognition.

The goal of this study was to compare the extent to which young and older adults exhibit flexibility in adjusting decision criteria in response to changes in recognition task difficulty. Forty-eight young and 48 older adults studied a list of word pairs and then took 2 successive tests of associative recognition, an easy test consisting of intact study pairs and new lure pairs and a hard test pitting intact study pairs against rearranged lures. The order of the 2 tests was manipulated, with half of the participants in each age group receiving the easy test first and half receiving the hard test first. When the easy test preceded the hard test, participants in both age groups adopted a more stringent response criterion on the harder test. When the hard test preceded the easy test, no criterion shift was seen in either age group. These results suggest that older adults have preserved metacognitive abilities with regard to assessing the consequences for accuracy of maintaining a lenient criterion when discrimination between experienced and new information becomes more difficult and further suggests that they can take appropriate action to control error rates under these conditions.