Susan E. Mason

Age and gender as factors in facial recognition and identification

The present study was designed to test adult age differences in the recognition and identification of faces. Young and old women were shown slides of faces paired with common first names. Their task was to associate the names and faces for a subsequent recognition test. On the test, subjects were shown a larger set of faces and they were asked to indicate which of the faces had been presented earlier. For those faces judged to be familiar, subjects were asked to select, from two alternatives, the name which was originally paired with the face. It was hypothesized that people would remember faces most like their own and, as predicted, young subjects tended to make fewer errors with young faces and old subjects tended to make fewer errors with old faces.

Instability of individual differences in the association between confidence judgments and memory performance

There are large individual differences in the degree of association between the accuracy of memories and subjective confidence in those memories. Are these differences stable within the same test, and between alternate forms of a test? In Experiment 1, college students were tested on 3 recognition memory tasks, then retested 2 weeks later on alternate forms of the same tasks. The relationship between confidence judgments and recognition performance displayed low split-half stability and low alternate-forms stability. A second experiment with elderly adults replicated these findings. In a third experiment, college students recalled answers to general knowledge questions and rated confidence in the correctness of each answer. Individual differences in the association between confidence and recall performance were not stable across the odd- and even-numbered items on the test. These data indicate the need for the development of procedures that will produce stable estimates of individuals’ metacognitive accuracy.

Marital Status and Age as Related to Masculine and Feminine Personality Dimensions and Self-Esteem

Abstract The relationships among marital status, gender role traits, and self-esteem in a sample of American men and women was investigated in the present study. Divorce was found to be associated with shifts in gender role identity, leading to greater masculine (but not androgynous) personality traits for both sexes. Intact marriages were associated with higher self-esteem and greater masculinity for both sexes, and greater feminity for women. Masculinity and feminity both contributed to womens self-esteem, but only masculinity was associated with male self-esteem. Finally, comparisons between the present data and those of Spence and Helmreich (1978) suggest the need for more research on gender role identification with nonacademic adult samples.

Oldsters and Ngrams: age stereotypes across time.

Google Books Ngram Viewer searches over five million books published between 1800 and 2000 and plots trends in word usage. With this tool, the frequencies of literary references to younger and older adults were assessed across time. Young and old women were shown to be underrepresented in the literature for the past 200 years. In addition, the usage of different terms and adjectives to describe older adults were tracked and found to change across time. The literature of the early 1900s, e.g., revealed a shift from more positive to less positive terms, which may reflect a change in attitude toward older adults.

Effect of Input Modality and Orienting Task on Memory

Researchers have long examined the effects of two major factors on memory, orienting task ( 1 ) and modality of input ( 2 ) . While it is clear, however, that orienting task and input modality independently affect retention, no study has examined whether specific interactions occur when these two factors are varied within a single experiment. In the present study, 66 subjects were assigned to one of three task conditions (semantic, structural and control), and to one of two modality conditions (auditory and visual). Subjects in both modality conditions were presented a list of 60 words, one word every 5 sec. Subjects given the semantic task were required to focus their attention on the meaning of each word by deciding whether it was active or passive. Those given the structural task were instructed to count the number of es each word contained. Control subjects were given standard learning instructions which did not include an orientingtask requirement. All subjects had a recall and then a recognition test following the list presentation. The recognition test consisted of GO target items and 120 distractors printed in a test booklet. A 2 x 3 between-subjects analysis of variance was performed on the recall scores and another was performed on the recognition data (see table). Analysis of the

Encoding in Anticipation of Immediate or Delayed Testing

Abstract The major purpose of the present study was to determine whether subjects differentially encode in anticipation of immediate or delayed testing. In two experiments, subjects were instructed to study a list of words for a memory test to be given either immediately after stimulus presentation or after a two-day delay. We found that incidental learning of instructions was more easily modified by the learning instructions than was the intentional learning of a word list, and that instructions to expect either immediate or delayed testing significantly altered the encoding strategy employed, though the effect appeared to be of a relatively short duration.

Sentence Recall as Affected by Task Instructions and Delay

The present experiment was designed to investigate the effects of orienting tasks on sentence recall. Three task conditions were included, a phonemic-task, a semantic-task, and a “no-orienting-task” control group. Both immediate and delayed recall were tested. As predicted, subjects in the semantic condition performed significantly better than those given phonemic instructions. On immediate recall, the performance of control subjects was similar to that of semantic subjects but superior to phonemic subjects. When the retention test was delayed, the difference between control and phonemic groups was nonsignificant. The results are not consistent with the depth-of-processing model.

Mental Imagery: A memory aid for the Older Adult?

Older adults demonstrate poor memory performance relative to young adults. This age-related difference in cognitive ability is reliably shown in most laboratory tests. Memory loss with age is also commonly reported by individuals as they reflect on developmental changes in their own behavior. Poor memory is so strongly associated with old age that is has become part of the stereotype of aging, alson with wrinkles and gray hair. It is a common belief that forgetting is one of the first signs of old age and that as we age it is natural and inevitable that we lose our memory. Further, many believe that memory loss is irreversible. The goal of researchers studying age-related changes in cognitive functioning is to determine to what extent decline with age can be prevented and to what extent memory problems associated with aging can be eliminated through mnemonic training. There is evidence that the poorer performance of the elderly may be due, in part, to age-related differences in the use of imaginai processing. Consequently, the use of mental imagery as a memory aid has become an important area of research for gerontologists.