Bombshell study: Old people repeat stories because they forget things

There may be a reason grandparents repeat the same stories over and over again. According to a new study, older people are more likely to forget who they’ve shared information with than younger people.

The study investigated two types of memory: destination memory, or memories of the people you have or haven’t told certain information, and source memory, memories of who told you a piece of information. Not only were older people bad at remembering who they’d told information, they were very confident in their mistaken memories.

“Older adults are additionally highly confident, compared to younger adults, that they have never told people particular things when they actually had,” study co-author Nigel Gopie, a cognitive scientist at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, said in a statement. “This over-confidence presumably causes older adults to repeat information to people.”