Cultural Differences in Susceptibility to Stereotype Threat: France versus India.

Objectives: Negative aging stereotypes make older adults perform below their true potential in a number of cognitive domains. This phenomenon, known as Age-Based Stereotype Threat, is currently viewed as a powerful factor contributing to an overestimation of cognitive decline in normal aging. However, age-based stereotype threat has been investigated almost exclusively in Western countries.

When Older Adults Outperform Young Adults: Effects of Prior-Task Success in Arithmetic.

Background: Older adults improve their cognitive performance on a target task after succeeding in a prior task. We tested whether effects of prior-task success occur via changing older adults' ability to select the better strategy and/or to execute strategies efficiently.

Methods: Young and older participants (n = 162) accomplished a computational estimation task (i.

When and how stereotype threat influences older adults' arithmetic performance: Insight from a strategy approach.

In 3 experiments, we investigated how age-related differences in cognitive performance are exacerbated by age-based stereotype threat. We adopted a strategy approach and investigated a domain, namely arithmetic, where age-related differences in participants' performance are either nonexistent or very small and where effects of age-based stereotype threat have never been investigated. In 2 types of tasks (problem verification in Experiment 1 and computational estimation in Experiments 2 and 3), we found that age-based stereotype threat led older adults to obtain poorer performance, to adopt less systematically and less often the better strategy on each problem, to repeat the same strategy across trials even when it was inappropriate, and to execute available strategies more poorly.