Abstract
Earlier research on the influence of babyfaceness on source memory indicates this facial characteristic may lead to source memory bias in younger adults. Data suggests the neonatal features of babyfaceness illicit first impressions of social submissiveness, physical weakness and a lack of cleverness. A previous study of source memory bias and babyfaceness collected data from an exclusively young adult sample, thus little is known about the influence of babyfaceness of the source memory of older adults. Repeating the earlier study of younger adults using the same procedure and stimuli, this experiment attempts to extend our knowledge of this phenomena to a more diverse population. We will expose older adults to pictures of mature-faced and babyfaced individuals paired with either a submissive or dominant sentence (some congruently, i.e. babyfaced individual/submissive sentence; some incongruently, i.e. babyfaced individual/dominant sentence). Later, we will test them for their memory of these pairings. We predict that older adults may experience bias in one of two ways, depending upon which cognitive mechanism has a stronger influence on memory. If older adults rely most strongly on trait-diagnostic information rather than stereotypes and schematic knowledge when forming impressions, their memory for incongruent behaviors of baby-faced or mature-faced individuals will be better than that of younger adults. Alternatively, because executive functioning declines with age, we may see older adults relying more heavily on schematic knowledge and stereotypes to make decisions about baby-faced or mature-faced individuals. Should this be the case, we would expect to see that older adults’ memory for incongruent behaviors of baby-faced or mature-faced individuals would be worse than that of younger adults.