Person Stereotypes and Memory for People

Snyder and Uranowitz have proposed a memory-priming mechanism by which information about a person that is normally unavailable in episodic memory is made available by the activation of a person stereotype that subsumes that information. In our two experiments subjects read a biography of Betty K, who was later labeled as either a heterosexual or a lesbian before the subjects took a recognition memory test. A signal-detection model was used to assess the effects of labeling on response bias as well as on the amount of information available in memory. Neither experiment produced any improved recognition memory for biographic information due to activation of a sexual stereotype. Both experiments found a response bias (guessing), however, acting in the direction of the label the subject received. It is concluded that at this time no clear empirical support exists for the memory-priming mechanism proposed by Snyder and Uranowitz.