Stereotype Reliance in Source Monitoring: Age Differences and Neuropsychological Test Correlates

Abstract

This study provides evidence that when source-specifying features are less available, people will rely more on their general knowledge to attribute memories to sources. Two factors (ageing and emotional self-focus) that, in general, are associated with poorer source identification performance both led to a greater reliance on stereotypes when participants attempted to remember who had said statements in a video they had watched earlier. In addition, correlations between older adults' ability to attribute statements correctly and their scores on a battery of neuropsychological tests suggests that both frontally based processes and medial temporally based processes affect accuracy of source identification, but do so to different degrees depending upon the nature of the source identification tasks.

Who’s funny: Gender stereotypes, humor production, and memory bias

“…The second study examined whether, in the context of a memory experiment, people would be more likely to recall funny things as having been produced by men. Previous work has shown that stereo-types, about occupations for example, can influence memory (e.g., Marsh, Cook, & Hicks, 2006;Mather, Johnson, & De Leonardis, 1999). If people give credit for funniness to men because they expect men to be funny, although it could not explain the origin of the stereotype, it could explain the stereotype's perpetuation.…”

Schema reliance for developmental goals increases from early to late adulthood: Improvement for the young, loss prevention for the old.

“…Indeed, compared with young adults, older adults have been found to rely more on schematic knowledge when trying to retrieve information from long-term memory. For example, they are more likely than young adults to falsely recognize pictures that fall into the same category as previously presented pictures (Koutstaal, Schacter, & Brenner, 2001) or to incorrectly attribute schematically related statements to speakers associated with that schema (Mather, Johnson, & De Leonardis, 1999). Neuropsychological correlates suggest that ageassociated increments in schema reliance are related to impaired reflective processing, which critically depends on prefrontal brain areas (Mather & Johnson, 2003).…”

Look who's talking! Facial appearance can bias source monitoring

“…Second, even with explicitly labelled, clearly distinct sources, pronounced effects are mostly found under poor memory-encoding or -retrieval conditions. For instance, biases are strongest among older adults (Mather et al, 1999), or when subjects experience high cognitive load during encoding or retrieval (Ehrenberg & Klauer, 2005;Sherman & Bessenoff, 1999). Third, it has been shown that source attribution biases are most pronounced when information about the sources is available at retrieval but not during encoding (Cook et al, 2003;Hicks & Cockman, 2003).…”

“…For 4 instance, in a study by Mather, Johnson and De Leonardis (1999), subjects saw video-clips of two speakers making political statements and subsequently received information that characterized each speaker as either Democrat or Republican. When subjects tried to recall who made particular statements, they were biased toward attributing statements matching a 'Democrat schema' to the Democrat speaker, and statements matching a 'Republican schema' to the Republican speaker.…”