Abstract
Previous research suggests that older persons show cognitive deficits in standardized laboratory tests, but not in more natural tests such as the Multiple Errands Task (MET). The absence of deficits in the latter tests has been attributed to the compensation of deficits by strategies based on life-long experience. To scrutinize this view, we primed older participants with positive or negative stereotypes about old age before administering MET. We found that compared to unprimed controls, priming with positive age stereotypes reduced the number of errors without changing response times, while priming with negative stereotypes changed neither errors not response times. We interpret our findings as evidence that positive age priming improved participants’ cognitive functions while leaving intact their experience-based compensation, and that negative age priming degraded participants’ cognitive functions which, however, was balanced by an even stronger experience-based compensation.
Highlights
Among the most prominent signs of cognitive aging are deficits of executive functions and working memory [1]
Our study evaluated the performance of older persons in a tablet-PC version of the Multiple Errands Task (MET)
Performance on that task is well preserved in older age but we observed an improvement when participants were primed with positive age stereotypes
Summary
Among the most prominent signs of cognitive aging are deficits of executive functions and working memory [1]. Stereotype Embodiment Theory [7, 8] offers an additional explanation of cognitive aging: older persons perform less well than young ones because they adopt and enact negative preconceptions about old age which prevail in society. This theory stipulates that older persons will improve their performance after being exposed to positive preconceptions about old age; such preconceptions do exist, they are less prevalent in many societies. Empirical support for Stereotype Embodiment Theory comes from studies on unconscious priming, where positive or negative age stereotypes were activated (‘primed’) without the participants’ awareness, such that participants could not willfully decide to counteract the activation.
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