Abstract
Past literature has extensively explored the ability for experimental paradigms to elicit semantically related false memories in younger and older adults. This research tends to focus on all types of semantic relationships, including categorical, functional and situational relationships between items. When remembering information, coding words into simple categories has been shown to be an effective way to encode the maximum amount of information about words or objects with the least cognitive effort, and recent research has suggested that categorical relationships between items elicit one of the highest rates of false memory production amongst semantic relationships. The current study sought to explore whether warnings could be tailored to reduce categorical false recall. Experiment 1A explored the effectiveness of warnings on younger adults who received a warning and revealed that younger adults effectively reduced the proportion of categorical memory errors after receiving a warning about the pervasiveness of categorical false memories. Experiment 1B explored age related differences upon the effectiveness of warnings and revealed that taken together, the pattern of memory errors proportions across younger and older adults was similar to findings found for younger adults only. Further analysis revealed older adults utilized warnings to reduce categorical memory errors (although not significantly) however they significantly reduced their other-semantic memory errors after receiving a warning. Our findings provide evidence for the effectiveness of warnings at reducing categorical memory errors in younger adults and older adults, with the pattern of findings for older adults suggesting that older adults may generalize warnings more broadly in an attempt to reduce all meaningful/semantically related memory intrusions.