Our final Cognitive Workshop of the year will be on Thursday, May 29th at 12:00 PM in Beecher 101. Marie Mazerolle, a postdoctoral scholar here in the Psychology department, will be presenting her talk, “Aging and Stereotype Threat: Cognitive Mechanisms and Psychosocial Intervention.”
Abstract:
The influence of salient stereotypes in our societies has intensively been examined in the past two decades using experiments demonstrating their role in the maintenance of certain differences between social groups, in the domain of cognitive performances among other things. Negative stereotypes about social groups would maintain stigmatized individuals’ performances at a suboptimal level, thus contributing to the observed differences. The talk will focus on the differences frequently observed between younger and older people regarding memory performances, and considered in the light of the stereotypes associated with cognitive aging. Specifically, our results clarify the nature of the mechanisms underlying stereotype threat in the older people (impact on controlled and automatic memory access) and also deliver ways to reduce this threat (via expressive writing) in test situations. Thus, without denying the idea of cognitive aging, our results therefore invite to consider the role of stereotype threat in group differences otherwise attributed solely to cognitive aging, and to continue the effort to better understand how to combat stereotypes in test situations where memory performances are assessed.
As always, food and drink will be provided.