The Effect of Stereotype Threat on Age Differences in Prospective Memory Performance: Differential Effects on Focal Versus Nonfocal Tasks

Zuber, Sascha; Ihle, Andreas; Blum, Anaëlle; Desrichard, Olivier; Kliegel, Matthias · 2019 · Crossref

DOI: 10.1093/geronb/gbx097

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Summary

This study investigates how stereotype threat influences age-related differences in prospective memory (PM), specifically examining whether task instructions that emphasize memory deficits impair older adults' performance. While PM decline in aging is typically attributed to cognitive resource losses, the authors propose that negative age stereotypes activated by specific task framings may also contribute to laboratory-based deficits. The research aims to determine if stereotype threat affects PM performance and to identify which cognitive mechanisms—spontaneous associative processes or controlled executive attention—are most susceptible to this threat. The researchers employed a between-subjects design with 120 participants: 60 younger adults (mean age 26.25) and 60 older adults (mean age 65.35). Participants performed an event-based PM task embedded within a reading comprehension ongoing task. They were instructed to underline specific cues: the word “Charlie” (focal task, requiring low cognitive demand due to overlap with the ongoing task) and words with circumflex accents (nonfocal task, requiring high cognitive demand and strategic monitoring). Participants were randomly assigned to one of two instruction conditions: a “memory” condition, which explicitly assessed mnemonic capacity (high stereotype threat), or a “reading” condition, which assessed reading ability (low stereotype threat). Statistical analyses included a three-way mixed ANOVA and Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines (MARS) to account for non-linear age effects. Results indicated that older adults performed worse than younger adults only in the memory condition, not in the reading condition. This age difference was specific to nonfocal PM tasks; no significant age differences emerged in focal tasks regardless of the instruction condition. Further analysis using MARS revealed that the interaction between age, condition, and task focality was significant only for participants aged 71 and older (“old-olds”). In this subgroup, stereotype threat significantly impaired performance on nonfocal tasks, which rely on controlled attention, but did not affect focal tasks. Younger adults and older adults under 71 showed no significant performance differences between the two instruction conditions. The findings demonstrate that stereotype threat can exacerbate age-related PM deficits, particularly in older adults aged 71 and above, by impairing executively controlled attentional processes rather than spontaneous associative memory. This suggests that laboratory-based PM deficits may be partially artifactual, driven by the activation of negative age stereotypes rather than pure cognitive decline. The study highlights the importance of carefully controlling task instructions in aging research to avoid inadvertently inducing stereotype threat. These results provide a process-level explanation for the “Age Prospective Memory Paradox,” where older adults perform poorly in labs but well in daily life, suggesting that minimizing stereotype threat allows older adults to perform comparably to younger peers.

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• prospective memory interruptions