Stereotype threat and working memory resource depletion effect

Résumé En

Recent work in cognitive load theory has shown that working memory resources can be depleted during a learning task (Chen, Castro-Alonso, Paas, & Sweller, 2018; Leahy, & Sweller, 2019). In previous experiments, we failed to obtain the working memory resource depletion effect with a transcription task (Vié et al., 2021) and with a dictation task (Brellier & Tricot, 2021). One criticism of cognitive load theory is that it does not take social factors sufficiently into account (Pennington et al., 2016). In the present experiment, we investigated the stereotype threat effect within the framework of cognitive load theory. Our three hypotheses are: (a) stereotype threat increases resource depletion but (b) this threat effect decreases over time unless (c) threat is reactivated during the task. Our study focused on the gender stereotype that girls perform less well than boys in mathematics.