AUTHOR=Chien Jessie Chih-Yuan , Eich Teal S. 

TITLE=Does stereotype threat influence age-related differences on directed forgetting tasks?

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 14 - 2023

YEAR=2024

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1296662

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1296662

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=Objectives: The Directed Forgetting paradigm is a powerful tool to explore motivated forgetting in the lab. Past work has shown that older adults are less able to intentionally suppress information from memory relative to younger adults, which is often attributed to deficits in inhibitory abilities. Instructions in traditional Directed Forgetting tasks contain terms that may elicit stereotype threat in older adults, which may negatively impact memory. Here, we tested whether the instructions in a Directed Forgetting task affected older adults’ ability to appropriately control the contents of memory.

Methods: In two experiments,, participants were randomized into four versions of a Directed Forgetting task. Experiment 1 contained 30 items, whereas Experiment 2 had 48 items. In four crossed conditions, participants were instructed to remember/forget or to think about/not think about items at encoding. At test, they were asked whether the memory probe was either old/new or whether it had been seen before or not. Both experiments contained data from 100 younger and 98 older adults. Participants were recruited from Prolific and tested online.  

Results: In neither Experiment 1 nor Experiment 2 did we find evidence of a stereotype threat effect, or age-related effects of directed forgetting. We did find that performance for to-be-forgotten items was worse in conditions with encoding instructions that contained words that might trigger stereotype threat relative to conditions that did not contain such words: when explicitly told to forget items, both older and younger adults forgot more items than did participants who were cued to not think about the words and put them out of mind. However, we found no such difference across the two different remember instructions: regardless of whether participants were told to remember or to think about items, recognition memory for to be retained items was high.  The pattern of results across the two experiments was similar, except participants performed worse in Experiment 2. Interestingly, we found that higher accuracy for to be remembered items was associated with a more positive outlook of one’s own memory relative to others. These results suggest that directed forgetting may not always be impaired in older adults.