ABSTRACT
A common problem in old age is remembering what was said but not who said it. An unsuspected but more embarrassing problem is that we remember anecdotes but bore our friends because we forget how often we have already told them in the same detail and in precisely the same words. Psychologists call memory for where we got information “source memory” and agree that it becomes less reliable as we age. This is inconvenient because, particularly in busy group conversations, it adds to other difficulties of age, such as deafness. People aged from 16 to 33 and from 60 to 82 could immediately recall videotaped simulations of crimes and subsequently identify the “perpetrator” in simulated line-ups of physically similar people. Young children have relatively poor source memory and are less able than adults to distinguish between events that they have actually experienced and those that they have only imagined.
