Assistant Professor Ayanna Thomas, Ph.D., recently published her paper entitled, “Reducing the Burden of Stereotype Threat Eliminates Age Differences in Memory Distortion” in Psychological Science. Thomas, using her work from The Cognitive Aging and Memory Lab at Tufts, provides evidence that if the elderly are primed to think of themselves as old, they are more likely to create false memories than those who are not. Thomas explains,

Older adults are more likely to falsely recall these unrepresented words than younger adults. We investigated whether we could reduce this age-difference in false memory susceptibility by reducing the influence of negative stereotypes of aging

Stacy Dubois, a former Tufts  graduate student, co-authored the paper as well.