An age-related associative memory deficit was evident during LTM but not STM retention intervals. Consistent with previous findings in the literature, this age-related LTM deficit was driven by higher false alarm rates for the older compared to younger adults. Interestingly, the findings from the current experiment are in support of the predicted results and indicate that changes in schematic support occurring from study events to test events can improve associative memory performance in both younger and older adults. Specifically, the false alarm rates were lower in the experimental change condition compared to the no change associative test condition for both age groups. Conceivably, younger and older adults were able to take advantage of the change in schematic support from study to test to improve their associative memory. Of primary interest to the current work, these findings implicate the role of changes in schematic support in reducing susceptibility to item familiarity for older adults, who may instead adopt recollection processes in service of correctly rejecting recombined associative pairs at test. While this pattern of results is intriguing, examination of the putative mechanisms giving rise to these schematic support benefits to associative LTM is an important next step.