Unpacking stereotype influences on source-monitoring processes: What mouse tracking can tell us

Publication date: March 2020Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 87Author(s): Liliane Wulff, Sophie E. ScharfAbstractThe goal of this study was to understand the cognitive dynamics of stereotype influences on source monitoring employing mouse tracking. By continuously recording cursor movements, we examined how stereotypical knowledge influences decision uncertainty when processing and later remembering stereotype-consistent and -inconsistent exemplars of the age categories of “young” and “old”. In a source-monitoring task, participants (N = 60) learned age-stereotype consistent or -inconsistent statements from two different-aged sources (young vs. old person) that they attributed to their original sources via mouse clicks in a later memory test. Our results showed that individuals experienced cognitive conflict during source attributions depending on both the correctness of the source response and whether the original source was (in)consistent with the stereotype of the respective age group reflected in the statement. This pattern of results was supplemented by the analysis of prototypical mouse-trajectory clusters. Modeling individual source-monitoring processes revealed that individuals' experienced conflict was less pronounced when they remembered the source and was unrelated to guessing resulting from memory failure. These results highlight the benefits of combining cognitive modeling and process-tracing techniques to unpack the mechanisms ...

Source: Journal of Experimental Social Psychology - January 21, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research