Mazerolle Marie, Régner Isabelle, Rigalleau François, Huguet Pascal
Department and Laboratory of Psychology, MSHE, Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté.
Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, LPC;
J Vis Exp. 2020 Jan 24(155). doi: 10.3791/59922.
As life expectancy increases, aging has become a major health challenge, resulting in a huge effort to better discriminate between normal and pathological cognitive decline. It is thus essential that cognitive tests and their administration are as fair as possible. However, an important source of bias during cognitive testing comes from negative aging stereotypes that can impair the memory performance of older adults and inflate age differences on cognitive tasks. The fear of confirming negative aging stereotypes creates an extra pressure among older adults which interferes with their intellectual functioning and leads them to perform below their true abilities. Here, we present a protocol that highlights simple but efficient interventions to alleviate this age-based stereotype threat effect. The first study showed that simply informing older participants about the presence of younger participants (threat condition) led older adults to underperform on a standardized memory test compared with younger participants, and that this performance difference was eliminated when the test was presented as age-fair (reduced-threat condition). The second study replicated these findings on short cognitive tests used to screen for predementia in clinical settings and showed that teaching older adults about stereotype threat inoculated them against its effects. These results provide useful recommendations about how to improve older adults' memory assessment both in Iab studies and in clinical settings.
随着预期寿命的增加，衰老已成为一项重大的健康挑战，这促使人们付出巨大努力以更好地区分正常和病理性认知衰退。因此，认知测试及其实施方式尽可能公平至关重要。然而，认知测试过程中一个重要的偏差来源是负面的衰老刻板印象，这种刻板印象会损害老年人的记忆表现，并夸大认知任务中的年龄差异。对证实负面衰老刻板印象的恐惧在老年人中造成了额外的压力，这会干扰他们的智力功能，导致他们的表现低于其真实能力。在此，我们提出了一个方案，该方案突出了一些简单但有效的干预措施，以减轻这种基于年龄的刻板印象威胁效应。第一项研究表明，仅仅告知老年参与者有年轻参与者在场（威胁条件），与年轻参与者相比，会导致老年人在标准化记忆测试中表现不佳，而当测试被呈现为年龄公平（威胁降低条件）时，这种表现差异就会消除。第二项研究在用于临床环境中筛查轻度认知障碍的简短认知测试中重复了这些发现，并表明向老年人传授刻板印象威胁知识可以使他们免受其影响。这些结果为如何在实验室研究和临床环境中改善老年人的记忆评估提供了有用的建议。
