Critically, the present results also extend previous work by providing evidence that increases in lure false recognition among older adults cannot be explained solely by retrieval failure, and are in part the result of declines in the availability of object details that can successfully disambiguate targets and foils with overlapping features. This observation is consistent with recent evidence for age-related decline in the ability to discriminate between objects that share overlapping features, even when demands on explicit memory encoding and retrieval are minimized (Burke et al., 2010; Lee et al., 2014; Ryan et al., 2012; Yeung et al., 2013). Together with the present results, this evidence suggests that aging is associated with decline in the quality of online stimulus representations, such that these representations are less able to disambiguate targets and foils that share overlapping features. More specifically, these data are consistent with recent proposals that aging is associated with a reduction in the availability of unique object-level representations, leading to increased reliance on representations of simple features and feature conjunctions that comprise these objects, which remain unaffected (Burke et al., 2010, 2011; 2012; Ryan et al., 2012).