Soutenance de thèse de Poshita PANDE

Although some cognitive decline is much conspicuous with the natural aging process, prevalent negative stereotypes in our social environment undermine older adults’ cognitive performance. This occurs because negative aging stereotypes (the culturally shared beliefs that aging inescapably causes severe cognitive decline and diseases) creates an extra pressure that interferes with intellectual functioning and leads older adults to perform below their true abilities. This is a phenomenon classically referred to as Age-Based Stereotype Threat (ABST; Lamont, Swift, & Abrams, 2015). With a growing aging population, we can expect older adults to be more vulnerable to the deleterious effects of these negative aging stereotypes, and experience ABST in various social settings. While most of the previous research in this area has already documented the disrupting effect of stereotypes on older adults’ mental competence (see Lamont et al., 2015 for an overview), unclear are the underlying mechanisms through which ABST results in increased age-related cognitive decline. Also, unknown is whether some older adults have resources that enables them to be unaffected (or less affected) by ABST and whether ABST influence older adults’ cognitive performance in domains undergoing no (or much less) age-related declines. Lastly, though negative stereotypes about cognitive aging are universally endorsed, it is unknown whether ABST may impair cognitive performance in older adults from cultures with more positive views about aging via the same underlying mechanism. In this context, this doctoral project adopted a strategy perspective on aging (see Lemaire, 2016, for an overview) according to which aging effects on human cognition are mediated by the type of strategies young and older adults use while accomplishing cognitive tasks and tested the hypothesis that ABST is associated with strategic variations. This hypothesis predicted that older adults tested under ABST experimental conditions use different sets of strategies, select and/or execute the best strategy less efficiently on each problem. Thus, the most important significance of this project lies in its furthering our understanding of the mechanisms underlying cognitive aging in general and specific ABST effects in particular. In a total of four experiments, we tested our strategy hypothesis in arithmetic problem solving where effects of age-based stereotype threat have never been previously investigated. In two types of arithmetic tasks (problem verification, e.g., 19 x 7 = 131 True or False? in Expt. 1 and computational estimation, e.g., 32 x 67 in Expts. 2, 3, & 4), we found that threat led older adults to obtain poorer performance, to adopt less systematically and less often the better strategy on each arithmetic problem, to repeat the same strategy across trials even when it was inappropriate, and to execute available strategies more poorly. We also found that poorer strategy use mediated threat effects, individual differences in processing resources moderated individuals’ sensitivity to effects of stereotype threat and, threat effects though extant in Asian culture, are relatively more pronounced in older adults from Western culture. The overall findings in this thesis revealed that strategic variations are key mechanisms for effects of age-based stereotype threat to occur even in domains where age-related decrease in performance are smaller (like arithmetic). It also documents how domain-general and domain-specific processing resources moderate individual differences in age-based stereotype threat effects, and cultural differences in occurrence of age-based stereotype threat effects. These findings have important implications to further understand age-based (and other) stereotype threat effects, and how a strategy perspective like the one adopted here provides important insights on how non-cognitive factors (like stereotype threat) modulate age-related changes in human cognition.

Although some cognitive decline is much conspicuous with the natural aging process, prevalent negative stereotypes in our social environment undermine older adults’ cognitive performance. This occurs because negative aging stereotypes (the culturally shared beliefs that aging inescapably causes severe cognitive decline and diseases) creates an extra pressure that interferes with intellectual functioning and leads older adults to perform below their true abilities. This is a phenomenon classically referred to as Age-Based Stereotype Threat (ABST; Lamont, Swift, & Abrams, 2015). With a growing aging population, we can expect older adults to be more vulnerable to the deleterious effects of these negative aging stereotypes, and experience ABST in various social settings. While most of the previous research in this area has already documented the disrupting effect of stereotypes on older adults’ mental competence (see Lamont et al., 2015 for an overview), unclear are the underlying mechanisms through which ABST results in increased age-related cognitive decline. Also, unknown is whether some older adults have resources that enables them to be unaffected (or less affected) by ABST and whether ABST influence older adults’ cognitive performance in domains undergoing no (or much less) age-related declines. Lastly, though negative stereotypes about cognitive aging are universally endorsed, it is unknown whether ABST may impair cognitive performance in older adults from cultures with more positive views about aging via the same underlying mechanism. In this context, this doctoral project adopted a strategy perspective on aging (see Lemaire, 2016, for an overview) according to which aging effects on human cognition are mediated by the type of strategies young and older adults use while accomplishing cognitive tasks and tested the hypothesis that ABST is associated with strategic variations. This hypothesis predicted that older adults tested under ABST experimental conditions use different sets of strategies, select and/or execute the best strategy less efficiently on each problem. Thus, the most important significance of this project lies in its furthering our understanding of the mechanisms underlying cognitive aging in general and specific ABST effects in particular. In a total of four experiments, we tested our strategy hypothesis in arithmetic problem solving where effects of age-based stereotype threat have never been previously investigated. In two types of arithmetic tasks (problem verification, e.g., 19 x 7 = 131 True or False? in Expt. 1 and computational estimation, e.g., 32 x 67 in Expts. 2, 3, & 4), we found that threat led older adults to obtain poorer performance, to adopt less systematically and less often the better strategy on each arithmetic problem, to repeat the same strategy across trials even when it was inappropriate, and to execute available strategies more poorly. We also found that poorer strategy use mediated threat effects, individual differences in processing resources moderated individuals’ sensitivity to effects of stereotype threat and, threat effects though extant in Asian culture, are relatively more pronounced in older adults from Western culture. The overall findings in this thesis revealed that strategic variations are key mechanisms for effects of age-based stereotype threat to occur even in domains where age-related decrease in performance are smaller (like arithmetic). It also documents how domain-general and domain-specific processing resources moderate individual differences in age-based stereotype threat effects, and cultural differences in occurrence of age-based stereotype threat effects. These findings have important implications to further understand age-based (and other) stereotype threat effects, and how a strategy perspective like the one adopted here provides important insights on how non-cognitive factors (like stereotype threat) modulate age-related changes in human cognition.