ACQUISITION OF PROTOTYPE-BASED INFORMATION ABOUT SOCIAL-GROUPS IN ADULTHOOD

Two experiments examined adult age differences in the ability to acqui re prototype-based information about a fictitious social group. Young and older adults were presented with 60 descriptions of people who var ied in their similarity to a prototypical group member along 12 (Exper iment 1) or 10 (Experiment 2) feature dimensions. The prototype repres ented either an arbitrary combination of features or a coherent set of features based on evaluative content. Younger adults generally perfor med better than the older adults in learning the arbitrary prototype. whereas age differences were absent or in favor of the older adults wh en the prototype consisted of evaluatively consistent features. The au thors argue that the results can be explained by the age-related varia tions in the reliance on automatic processing mechanisms and the congr uence of these processes with the demands of the task across prototype conditions.