Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 21, 2026

Highlighting and Reducing the Impact of Negative Aging Stereotypes During Older Adults' Cognitive Testing
Published on: January 24, 2020
Aging and categorization: could relevant pieces of information reduce older persons' inhibitory deficit?
Valérie Pennequin1, Thierry Plaie, Roger Fontaine
1Université de Tours, France. pennequin@univ-tours.fr
Abstract:
The goal of this study was to reduce the inhibitory deficit on the elderly by creating "optimizing conditions" in a categorization task. It was hypothesized that increasing the number of relevant pieces of information would reduce the difficulty associated with processing irrelevant information on a categorization task, since the number of relevant solutions to solve the problem would increase, while the total number of pieces of information to be processed would remain the same. This hypothesis was tested on 27 young adults and 30 elderly people using a task requiring the matching of a stimulus figure to one of the two response figures having one or more attributes in common with the stimulus. In line with previous findings, the results indicated an age-related inhibitory decline. However, consistent with the hypothesis, as the number of relevant attributes increased, the performance of elderly people improved and response times decreased, supporting the notion of latent cognitive resources.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination
Cognitive Development During Adulthood
Interference and Decay
Interference occurs when competing memories hinder the retrieval of particular information. It can be classified into two types: proactive and retroactive interference. Proactive...
Role of Cerebellum and Prefrontal Cortex in Memory
Alzheimer Disease l: Introduction
Dementia l: Introduction

