42. ERP evidence for age differences in susceptibility to emotional distraction in a source monitoring task

Event-related potentials were used to determine the degree to which the emotional salience of distracting lures would lead to more false positive source monitoring decisions for older than younger adults. Along with emotional lures, we included another set of lures (animal names) to ensure that false recognition was due to the emotionality of lures and not their category distinctiveness. Older adults made more source errors overall but the distractibility of lures differed as a function of age. Both behavioral and electrophysiological data revealed that younger adults were more distracted by emotion whereas the older adults showed no evidence of such distraction, being mislead instead by animal foils. Thus, an age-dependent difference in the salience of distracters interacts with frontally based executive functions in controlling source error. © 2001 Academic Press.