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False memories that fill in for failing recall are not a part of normal aging. A recent study presented at the American Psychological Association meeting in Toronto describes that false memories and other cognitive declines have often been associated with normal aging. Instead the study showed that these deficits can be more directly linked to measurable declines in executive control functions in frontal brain lobes.
Memories called veridical memories are those that generally conform to reality. These are memories that provide a relatively accurate representation of a past experience. False memories occur when events that we remember are different from the way they actually occurred, or in the most dramatic cases, when we remember events that never happened. False memories often result when we mistakenly merge elements of various past experiences or when imagination is used to fill holes in a sketchy recollection.
Drs Henry L. Roediger III and James S. McDonnell of the Department of Psychology, Washington University, St Louis presented data from a group of adults (average age 75) and found that about one out of four had managed to avoid the memory declines so common in older adults. Using a battery of neuropsychological tests along with a video vignette, the researchers used college students in their early 20s as a benchmark. Results surprisingly showed that older adults with high frontal lobe function performed virtually as well as their young counterparts, both in terms of recalling real events and in avoiding traps designed to induce false memories.
Theories looking at why false memories increase with age suggest that older adults fail to properly encode information as an event is experienced or may have problems retrieving and sorting such details during recall. Another theory suggest that frontal lobe problems make it difficult for older adults to focus attention on the memory task at hand and to effectively place retrieved information in context. Thus when frontal lobe declines, so does memory for the source of the events.
Clearly more research is needed with older adults with different demographics and perhaps studies should be done that delineate differences in memory at different age levels.
It is interesting that Mark Twain said "I am grown old and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened."
11:18:21 PM 
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