Written by Lisa Cossu and Maëlis Durand
Keywords : Elderly, Memory, Stereotype threat effect, Prior Task
Introduction
It is well-known that older adults have struggle with their memory. These memory deficits impact their everyday life and are often detected during a neuropsychological evaluation. Neuropsychologists have for mission to explore people’s cognitive and psychological functioning and for that, it is important that they keep informed about new knowledge thanks to scientific and experimental researches. Thus, they can adapt the conditions for taking neuropsychological evaluation and it also adds more material for the interpretation of the results.
Geraci and Miller, (2013) were interested in the cognitive functioning with older adults more particularly their memory abilities. They conceived a new protocol which aims to enhance performances of the elderly. We think that their experiment is quite interesting because it brings out that an easy and successful prior task could improve memory abilities for older adults.
First, we are going to lean on researches from which Geraci and Miller have worked to design their new protocol, and then we will describe the procedure of their experiment and their outcomes. Finally, we will consider different explanations gave by the authors and their potential effect.
Research
Predesigned
Geraci and Miller, (2013) start from the observation that older people have negative stereotypes in mind about their aging memory abilities and it influences their performances. Relying on Steele and Aronson’s, (1995) theory about “stereotype threat effect” which explains that the activation of negative stereotypes have negative effects on the population whom experience these stereotypes such as African-American are not as smart as white people, women are less competent in scientific matter or the elderly have weak performances in most of cognitive tasks due to aging. When the threat is activated, their performances just confirm the stereotype.
There are different manners to activate those stereotypes: explicitly or implicitly. We can explicitly tell participants that there are differences between young and older adults or we can simply make them read a text about positive or negative stereotypes so the threat will be induce implicitly (Hess, Hinson & Hodges, 2009; Hess & Hinson, 2006 quoted by Geraci & Miller, 2013). However, stereotypes can also be activated without doing anything, just because participants have some knowledge about cognitive functioning in aging, especially about memory functioning. Thus, if older participants know that there are going to be tested on a memory task then the stereotype threat will be automatically activated.
Hypotheses
From this observation on the stereotype threat effect, Geraci and Miller, (2013) hypothesized that a prior task successfully accomplished by the elderly could convince them about their abilities. They suppose a prior task success, no matter the nature of this task, will increase the performances on a target task which implies memory. Thus, they assume that older adults with a prior task success will have better performances on the target task than older adults without prior task success or unsuccessful prior task. Thereby, a prior task success would counteract the effect of stereotype threat.
Method
Their method aims to compare 75 older adults to 75 young adults. They’ve created 3 conditions: prior task success, control condition and unsuccessful prior task.
The prior task was a linguistic one where participants had to create a phrase grammatically correct from multiple sets of scrambled words. In the successful condition participants had enough time to create a valid sentence while participants in the unsuccessful condition did not have enough time.
The main task following the prior task was to learn 30 related words in different semantic categories and then participants had to recall them.
Results
Their findings show that prior task success really had an effect in older adults which enable them to increase their performances in free recall. Indeed, older participants in the unsuccessful condition and in the ones in the control condition didn’t enhance their memory performances counter to older participants in the successful condition. Thus, the authors had confirmed their hypothesis. Participants knew that they were going to take a memory task so the stereotype threat was probably activated while the experiment, hence their prior task success could have permitted to go through the negative effects of this activation.
The authors didn’t find any effect of the prior task success in young adults therefore older adults in successful condition had equal performances with younger adults’ ones.
Moreover, Geraci and Miller have found that older adult participants in the successful condition were less anxious than participants in the two other conditions. Thus, this decrease of anxiety could also have a part in enhancing their abilities.
Discussion
Connections between the stereotype threat and prior task success are only speculative because threat didn’t have been directly evaluated but only supposed due to participants who knew that it is their memory which was going to be evaluated. Geraci and Miller insist that other studies are necessary to investigate more precisely how a prior task success could influence older adults’ performances and how they perceive their own cognitive abilities following a successful task.
The experimenters consider their findings in the practical field. Indeed, this new protocol could help the elderly to maintain or even enhance their cognitive capacities during aging. Neuropsychologists could also rethink their method during a neuropsychological assesement so they could start with easier tests before the ones more demanding for the aging cognitive functioning. It could help the patient to be more comfortable with the evaluation so he or she could have results more in adequacy with their real cognitive capacities. Finally, the authors ask themselves if the prior task success could have any positive effects on cognitive functioning even if the nature of the task is other than a cognitive one. More studies will tell.
Conclusion
We think that this new strategy of a prior task is relevant and should be taken into account for future researches about aging and also the way the elderly are cared for and assesed. It could prevent many false diagnoses of degenerative diseases for example. However it could take time in the practical field because of some constraints that professionals encounter such as time limited for their evaluations so they can’t administer all the tests they’d like, and they have to take into account the fatigability of their patients so they have to choose the main tests first despite the cognitive cost and the stress it can induce.
Geraci and Miller point the fact that it is essential to welcome warmly the patients in spite of limited time so it can reduce stress and anxiety and would comfort them before taking the evaluation. Thus, if anxiety has an impact on their cognitive performances like suggested in their experiment, comforting the patient could have positive effects.
Finally, the potential effects of prior task success could question us on what is really impair with aging since it permits older adults to have comparable performances with younger adults.
Words we have learned : scrambled = brouillé, adequacy = adéquation, field = champ, warmly = chaleureusement
Bibliography :
Geraci, L., & Miller, T. M. (2013). Improving older adults’ memory performance using prior task success. Psychology and Aging, 28(2), 340–345. https://doi.org/10.1037/a00303327
Steele, C.M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of african americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(5), 797-811. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.69.5.797