Ageing Stereotypes and False Memories
Today's post is provided by Katya Numbers . She discusses her recent paper " Ageing stereotypes influence the transmission of false memories in the social contagion paradigm ", which is forthcoming in Memory. I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of New South Wales as well as the Coordinator of the Sydney Memoryand Ageing Study . My research focuses on metamemory (our beliefs about our own and others’ memories) and ageing. Specifically, I am interested in whether peoples’ subjective beliefs about memory and age can predict and/or influence actual memory performance, both in younger and older adults. If two people are recalling a shared event, and one person misremembers that event, it is very easy for their false memory to change the other person’s memory of what occurred. We call this the social contagion of memory. It has been well established that the social contagion effect is influenced by how credible a person is seen to be. That is, people are more like...