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The reliability of our memories is of crucial importance, both in extraordinary situations (e.g. court testimony) and in everyday life (e.g., when a person must take medication on a regular basis). To address these issues, numerous studies documented the conditions under which false memories emerge. Research clearly demonstrated that memory distortions are a normal and frequent phenomenon in the general population, but greatly accentuated in aging. Here, we review studies that documented age-related impact on memory distortions in the DRM and misinformation paradigms. Next, we examine the factors that underlie false memory susceptibility, with a focus on socio-emotional factors, and in particular aging stereotypes. We present recent results that highlighted the way negative age-related stereotypes might threaten older adults’ and influence false memory susceptibility. Importantly, we also demonstrate that older adult’s memory distortions can easily be reduced when taking into account tasks’ characteristics and participants’ motivation. Finally, we discuss the implications of age-related stereotypes when older adults’ memory is evaluated, both from a theoretical and an applied perspective.

Objectives: In two studies, we examined the effects of age-related stereotype threat on eyewitness memory using the misinformation paradigm to (a) examine stereotype threat in the context of a more ecologically valid memory task and (b) to determine the relationship between task difficulty and susceptibility to stereotype threat., Methods: After watching a video that depicted a crime, older and younger adult participants were presented with a written synopsis in which information consistent or inconsistent with the original event was presented. Half of the participants were then presented with information designed to activate negative stereotypes about aging. Finally, participants completed a memory test., Results: In Study 1, when participants were instructed to report information from either the video or the synopsis to complete the final memory test, older adults under high stereotype threat were less accurate than those under low threat. In Study 2, when participants were required to engage in more controlled processes at retrieval and respond with only video information, older adults under stereotype threat performed as well or better than those under low threat., Discussion: The results are consistent with the Regulatory Focus Model of Stereotype Threat., (© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Introduction: The number of older people diagnosed with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), the prodromal state of Alzheimer's disease (AD), is increasing worldwide. However, some patients with aMCI never convert to the AD type of dementia, with some remaining stable and others reverting to normal. This overdiagnosis bias has been largely overlooked and gone unexplained. There is ample evidence in the laboratory that negative ageing stereotypes (eg, the culturally shared belief that ageing inescapably causes severe cognitive decline) contribute to the deteriorating cognitive performances of healthy older adults, leading them to perform below their true abilities. The study described here is intended to test for the first time whether such stereotypes also impair patients' cognitive performances during neuropsychological examinations in memory clinics, resulting in overdiagnosis of aMCI., Methods and Analysis: The ongoing study is a 4-year randomised clinical trial comparing patients' physiological stress and cognitive performances during neuropsychological testing in memory clinics. A total of 260 patients attending their first cognitive evaluation will be randomised to either a standard condition of test administration, assumed here to implicitly activate negative ageing stereotypes or a reduced-threat instruction condition designed to alleviate the anxiety arising from these stereotypes. Both groups will be tested with the same test battery and stress biomarkers. For 30 patients diagnosed with aMCI in each group (n=60), biomarkers of neurodegeneration and amyloidopathy will be used to distinguish between aMCI with normal versus abnormal AD biomarkers. A 9-month follow-up will be performed on all patients to identify those whose cognitive performances remain stable, deteriorate or improve., Ethics and Dissemination: This protocol has been approved by the French National Agency for Medicines and Health Products Safety and the Sud-Est I French Ethics Committee (2017-A00946-47). Results will be published in peer-reviewed journals., Trial Registration Number: NCT03138018., Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared., (© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2019. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.)

Objectives: There is today ample evidence that negative aging stereotypes impair healthy older adults' performance on cognitive tasks. Here, we tested whether these stereotypes also decrease performance during the screening for predementia on short cognitive tests widely used in primary care., Method: An experiment was conducted on 80 healthy older adults taking the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) under Threat or Reduced-threat condition., Results: Stereotype threat significantly impaired older adults' performance on both tests, resulting in 40% of older adults meeting the screening criteria for predementia, compared with 10% in Reduced-threat condition (MMSE and MoCA averaged)., Discussion: Our research highlights the influence of aging stereotypes on short cognitive tests used to screen for predementia. It is of critical importance that physicians provide a threat-free testing environment. Further research should clarify whether this socially induced bias may also operate in secondary care by generating false positives., (© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Because of a dramatic increase of older people worldwide, screening for prodromal state of Alzheimer disease (AD) is a major societal challenge. Many individuals diagnosed with prodromal AD, do not convert to AD, some remaining stable and others reversing back to normal. We argue that an important source of this overdiagnosis comes from negative aging stereotypes (eg, the culturally shared beliefs that aging inescapably causes severe cognitive decline and diseases). Many laboratory studies show that such stereotypes impair memory performance in healthy older adults, producing inflated age differences. Research is needed to examine how aging stereotypes implicitly permeate neuropsychological testing and contribute to false positives.

There is now evidence that negative age-related stereotypes about memory reduce older adults' memory performance, and inflate age differences in this domain. Here, we examine whether stereotype threat may also influence the basic feeling that one is more or less able to remember. Using the Remember/Know paradigm, we demonstrated that stereotype threat conducted older adults to a greater feeling of familiarity with events, while failing to retrieve any contextual detail. This finding indicates that stereotype threat alters older adults' subjective experience of memory, and strengthens our understanding of the mechanisms underlying stereotype threat effects.

The threat of being judged stereotypically (stereotype threat) may impair memory performance in older adults, thereby producing inflated age differences in memory tasks. However, the underlying mechanisms of stereotype threat in older adults or other stigmatized groups remain poorly understood. Here, we offer evidence that stereotype threat consumes working memory resources in older adults. More important, using a process-dissociation procedure, we found, for the first time, that stereotype threat undermines the controlled use of memory and simultaneously intensifies automatic response tendencies. These findings indicate that competing models of stereotype threat are actually compatible and offer further reasons for researchers and practitioners to pay special attention to age-related stereotypes during standardized neuropsychological testing.