The relation between source memory and aging.

Previous research has shown that elderly adults have difficulty recalling the source of recently acquired facts but does not indicate whether source memory is more impaired than fact memory. This study examined old and young subjects' memory for novel facts that had been read to them by 1 of 2 experimental sources either in a random order or in a blocked order. When fact memory was equated in young and old at different levels of performance, the elderly exhibited disproportionate source memory deficits in the blocked condition but not in the random condition. Results suggest that the relation between fact and source memory in the elderly varies across experimental conditions.