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Aging baby boomers may not fit the mold that some people have for older adults. And in a somewhat strange connection, a new study suggests that older adults who hold more restrictive views about how these older people behave may also notice more problems with their memory.

Researchers found that participants reported more memory failures on days when they more strongly endorsed “prescriptive” ageist attitudes — beliefs about what older people should or should not do because of their age.

The finding did not concern how participants thought they personally should behave. Instead, it connected their memory complaints with the expectations they placed on other older adults.

“One person might have very strong ageist attitudes on a Monday, but weak ageist attitudes on a Friday, and that person likely also reported significantly more memory failures on Monday than on Friday,” said Shevaun Neupert, the study’s corresponding author and a psychology professor at North Carolina State University.

The study was published in the International Journal of Behavioral Development.

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Participants completed two weeks of surveys

For the main analysis, researchers recruited 974 adults between the ages of 50 and 94 from the United States, Canada, Germany, Austria, Ukraine, India, China, Israel, and Türkiye.

Participants completed daily surveys for 14 days, producing data covering a total of 12,261 days. The surveys measured their attitudes about aging and the memory failures they experienced each day, such as forgetting a name, word, or medication.

The researchers examined both differences among participants and day-to-day changes within the same person. They found that people who generally held stronger ageist attitudes reported more memory failures. Individual participants also tended to report more problems on days when their ageist attitudes were more pronounced.

The pattern was not substantially influenced by the country in which participants lived, according to the researchers.

“That’s significant because aging, ageism, and memory loss are all important issues around the world,” Neupert said.

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Smaller study did not find the same connection

The published research also included a second study involving 111 adults ages 65 to 91 in Switzerland. Those participants completed seven assessments per day over two weeks.

Unlike the larger international study, the Swiss analysis found no significant association between age-related experiences, subjective age, and daily memory failures.

The difference means the overall findings should be interpreted cautiously. It could reflect variations in what the two studies measured: The larger study focused on participants’ prescriptive attitudes toward other older people, while the Swiss study examined personal experiences of ageism.

The smaller sample also may have made an association harder to detect.