OBJECTIVES: The present study investigates age differences in the vulnerability to illusory correlations between fear-relevant stimuli and threatening information.
METHOD: Younger and older adults saw pictures of threatening snakes and nonthreatening fish, paired with threatening and nonthreatening context information ("poisonous" and "nonpoisonous") with a null contingency between animal type and poisonousness. In a source monitoring test, participants were required to remember whether an animal was associated with poisonousness or nonpoisonousness. Illusory correlations were implicitly measured via a multinomial model. One advantage of this approach is that memory and guessing processes can be assessed independently. An illusory correlation would be reflected in a higher probability of guessing that a snake rather than a fish was poisonous if the poisonousness of the animal was not remembered.
RESULTS: Older adults showed evidence of illusory correlations in source guessing while younger adults did not; instead they showed evidence of probability matching. Moreover, snake fear was associated with increased vulnerability to illusory correlations in older adults.
DISCUSSION: The findings confirm that older adults are more susceptible to fear-relevant illusory correlations than younger adults.