Age and memory
It is a common stereotype that memory significantly gets worse as a person becomes older. There is now evidence that shows that these negative stereotypes may actually be negatively affecting the memory of older people who believe this to be true. Older adults who have more positive views on aging and memory have done better on memory performance tests than those who live in cultures where negative views on aging and memory surround them. A possible reason for this difference, is that when people convince themselves that aging effects memory, their effort and strategy use may be changed, which may ultimately effect their memory performance. In this journal, experimenters look at the effects of implicit priming and explicit priming of aging stereotypes. Implicit priming is activating certain associations in memory without conscious recollection, whereas explicit priming is activating associations in memory of facts and experiences. Both implicit and explicit priming were found to have an effect on older adults' memory. This research article examines the relationship between age, culture, and memory performance. Researchers ha
Tests were also given to measure participants' anxiety, self handicapping, verbal ability, memory recall, and awareness. In short, people should try to think more positively, because it is entirely possible that your negative thinking could be impacting your ability to remember things later in life. For the explicit priming, the study showed that older adults can control the impact of negative stereotypes, but only when the primes are relatively subtle. However, for the young adults, it was exactly the opposite. Although there have been discrepancies across studies about this subject, it is still clear that aging stereotypes have a definite impact on people. Interestingly, for the older adults, the recall following the positive prime was greater than the recall following the negative prime. Also, just as they had hypothesized, the priming had a very small impact on the memory performance of the younger adults. Also, because the experimenters' goal was to prove an idea that they had seen evidence for and that they already somewhat believed in, that opens the possibility for bias in the experiment. First, they wanted to see if the effects of implicit stereotyping on memory performance are reliable with older adults. ve found, overall, smaller age differences in groups of people who have more positive beliefs about aging. Each person was also given a scrambled sentence task to trigger stereotypes about aging and memory. Overall, the young adults recalled more than the older adults. In the first experiment, young and old adults were either implicitly or explicitly primed with either positive or negative aging stereotypes, and then given a memory test after. The researchers believed that this would be proved to be true, and that aging stereotypes would have a large impact on the memory of older adults, but very little on younger adults. Both of these groups were split into an aware group, and an unaware group, based on tests.
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