Healthy aging leads to a significant decline in episodic memory, producing a reduction in thelikelihood of successful recollection, such that older adults remember less than younger adults.Emerging evidence from behavioral and neuroimaging studies demonstrate that recollectedinformation can also be more or less precise, highlighting a source of variability in memoryperformance not typically considered in studies of aging. Consequently, it is unknown whetherolder adults, compared to younger adults, only show a significant reduction in recollection rate or also exhibit a decline in recollection precision. Here, we provide new insight into age-relatedmemory decline by employing a novel source task that allows us to examine both the quantity(rate) and quality (precision) of episodic memory retrieval. First, we validated our task,demonstrating that it can effectively capture variability in both the rate and precision in olderadults. Second, we directly compared younger and older adults’ performance as a function ofstudy-test delay, showing significant reductions in both the rate and precision of recollectionwith age. Finally, we asked whether age-related changes in recollection can be accounted for bya reduction in attention, revealing that the division of attention in young adults results in areduction in rate but shows little evidence for a change in precision. Our results raise questionsabout the nature of age-related memory decline, highlighting the importance of measuring boththe quality and quantity of memory, and suggest new routes to achieve the early detection anddiagnosis of abnormal aging deficits.