ABSTRACT
Like repotting a houseplant, moving to a new university allows a researcher to grow roots in an expanded, fertile, fresh environment. One then hopes for new foliage as well. In our lab’s case, we moved just as social psychology was opening up to neuro-imaging techniques, and our new setting provided ample opportunities for collaboration and facilities for scanning, in particular. I was excited immediately because my prior work on the continuum model of categorization was a decade old, and we had run the course of the obvious conventional lab studies (Fiske, Lin, & Neuberg, 1999). Still, part of me wondered whether the distinction between category-based and individuated processes was a theoretical convenience to organize the literature, or something more. Then I encountered a paper by my prospective colleague Marcia Johnson, suggesting that aging adults over-rely on stereotypes when they cannot retrieve individuating information to remember who said what (Mather, Johnson, & De Leonardis, 1999). What caught my eye was that these impairments correlated with neuropsychological tests implicating distinct brain regions for each process. My first reaction was, “Maybe we aren’t making it up,” the categorizing-individuating distinction, and I rushed to Marcia’s door, only to find it closed. She had left Princeton University for Yale University just as I arrived, so our lab was on our own in this quest.
