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Cognitive aging

Do racial stereotypes shape who we remember holding a weapon?

Erickson WB, Wright A, Naveh-Benjamin M · Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2022

Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC

Older adults remembered which face went with which object worse than younger adults, pairing Black faces with weapons did not reduce that gap, but older adults with stronger implicit pro-White bias more often falsely 'remembered' Black faces with objects they had not been seen with.

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Study at a glance

Design
Human experiment — 3 (older adults; younger full attention; younger divided attention, randomly assigned) x 3 object type x 2 face race x 2 test type (item vs. associative) mixed design, followed by a race IAT
N
N=111 · 68 younger adults (39 full attention, 29 divided attention) and 43 older adults; IAT analyses exclude 12 older and 9 younger full-attention participants tested before the IAT was added
Population
University of Missouri undergraduates and community-dwelling older adults from Central Missouri; predominantly White
Outcome
Item and associative recognition memory (hits, false alarms, hits minus false alarms) for face-object pairs; race IAT D scores

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Key findings

The classic age-related associative deficit replicated: memory for pairs fell further below memory for single items in older adults than in younger adults. Contrary to the main hypothesis, Black face-weapon pairs were not remembered better and did not shrink the age gap; a Bayesian check favoured no difference for older adults. The mostly White sample recognised White faces better than Black faces, mainly because of more false alarms to Black faces, especially among older adults. Older adults and divided-attention younger adults showed moderate implicit pro-White bias, and among older adults stronger bias predicted more false alarms on associative tests with Black faces, regardless of object type.

Methodology

Younger and older adults studied pairs of photos, each showing a Black or White man's face next to a weapon, a kitchen item or an unrelated object, for seven seconds each, knowing they would be tested. Some younger adults studied while also responding to tones (divided attention). Afterwards everyone took recognition tests for faces alone, objects alone, and face-object pairs, where half the pairs were re-shuffled within race. Finally, participants completed a race Implicit Association Test (IAT).

Limitations

The key IAT-memory links were exploratory, just reached significance, and rested on reduced samples because the IAT was added after testing began. The samples were almost entirely White, local to one Midwestern university town, so the own-race and bias effects cannot be generalised across groups, and older adults' social attitudes and contact with Black people were not measured. The face photos came from a mugshot database and were shown beside objects rather than held, which the authors note may limit real-world relevance to eyewitness situations. Recognising a recombined pair in a lab is far removed from real lineup identifications, so implications for the justice system are speculative.

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