| Abstract: | Adaptive social functioning requires flexibility in processing operations in response to the characteristics of specific situations. Three experiments were conducted in which the ability of different-aged adults to appropriately use category-based versus attribute-based information in making affective judgments was examined. Contrary to expectations, we found that performance was minimally related to age or to working memory efficiency. Adults of all ages made affective judgments based on category information when such information resulted in appropriate inferences, whereas attribute-based information was used when category-based inferences were inaccurate. We interpret these results to be consistent with the hypothesis that the processing of evaluative information occurs at a preconscious level with little drain on processing resources. |
