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11:00 - 12:30
Parallel sessions 5
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11:00 - 12:30
Room: HSZ - N5
Chair/s:
Désirée Schönung, Nikoletta Symeonidou
Source memory research aims at understanding how people remember the origin of information (e.g., Where did I read the latest news?). This double symposium brings together findings of both basic (Part 1) and more applied (Part 2) source memory research. Building on the theoretical and methodological framework introduced in Part I, this second part elucidates the important role of source memory in more applied contexts.
Luise Metzger opens the session with the project “Source Memory for AI- vs. Human-Generated Online Content”, which aims to investigate whether people spontaneously categorize and recall web content as human- or AI-generated. The project further explores whether people who are less trusting toward AI show better source discrimination.
Oktay Ülker continues with “The Source of My Source: Effects of Learning Partner Expertise on Source Memory in Collaborative Learning”. This research examines how well individuals remember which source (trustworthy, untrustworthy, no source) their study partner cited in the collaboration phase.  By additionally varying the expertise (high vs. low) of the learning partner, the study also tests schema-incongruency effects in source memory.
Relatedly, in “Advice Taking on Social Media: The Influence of Source Memory for Advisor Trustworthiness on Advice Weighting” Johanna Höhs focuses on how well people remember the trustworthiness of advisors encountered on social media. The study also addresses whether enhanced source memory supports adaptive advice taking – favoring trustworthy over untrustworthy advisors.
Nikoletta Symeonidou then bridges to source-memory research in specific populations. Focusing on older adults in her talk “Effects of Negative Age Stereotypes on Source Memory”, she presents findings showing that activating negative age stereotypes can impair source memory in older adults. These results highlight the importance of creating age-fair testing.
Extending the discussion to (sub)clinical populations, Isabel Porstein concludes the session with “Source Monitoring Along the Continuum of Psychosis: Insights from Schizotypy.” Her research explores how subclinical schizotypy dimensions relate to source memory and source guessing biases, particularly regarding reality-monitoring impairments, which are often discussed as mechanism underlying hallucinations.
The second session concludes with a general discussion, highlighting the main findings and potential implications of all contributions from a basic and applied perspective.
Submission 432
Effects of Negative Age Stereotypes on Source Memory
SymposiumTalk-04
Presented by: Nikoletta Symeonidou
Nikoletta Symeonidou, Karin Häußermann, Beatrice G. Kuhlmann
Department of Psychology, University of Mannheim, Germany
Older adults are vulnerable to age-based stereotype threat (ST) – the concern of confirming negative stereotypes about aging, such as memory decline. Prior meta-analytic evidence suggests that ST exerts small to medium detrimental effects on older adults’ performance, especially in memory tasks (Lamont et al., 2015). This experiment aimed to test the influence of expectations regarding age-related memory ability on source memory – a type of memory particularly impaired by aging. Participants (n = 133 younger, age range = 19-30 years; n = 135 older adults, age range = 60-90 years) read one of three newspaper articles describing a cruise ship designed to subtly activate negative (threat), positive (non-threat), or neutral (control) expectations about aging. The articles were pretested in a pilot study that descriptively confirmed successful threat induction. After reading, participants completed a source monitoring task in which they encoded objects presented with labels spoken by a male or female face. The study was conducted online, except for 25 older adults who preferred in-lab participation. Multinomial modeling revealed that older adults in the threat condition showed reduced source memory compared to those in the non-threat and control conditions, which did not differ. Surprisingly, the same pattern emerged among younger adults. However, further analyses indicated that perceived threat correlated negatively with source memory only among threatened older adults. Moreover, despite typical age-related declines in source memory, older adults outperformed younger adults in item memory. We discuss whether age-differences in motivation and compliance during online-testing can partially account for these results.