Adult age differences in memory for imagined and performed actions.

Young and older adults were presented a list of 24 descriptions of simple actions. For each list item, subjects were either instructed to perform the action or else were instructed to imagine themselves performing the action. On a surprise recall test, age differences were found for both performed and imagined actions as well as for source judgments (remembering which actions had been performed and which imagined). The latter effect, however, resulted from the near chance level of performance of a minority of the older adults; the performance of the majority of the older adults overlapped with that of the young adults on the source judgment task.