Social Cognition, Vol. 29, No. 4, 2011, pp. 393–414 393 © 2011 Guilford Publications, Inc. The research reported in this article was supported by a research grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to Klaus Rothermund and Dirk Wentura (RO 1272/5-1,2). This project is part of the collaborative research unit “Discrimination and Tolerance in Intergroup Relations” (DFG FOR 461). Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Prof. Dr. Klaus Rothermund, Institute of Psychology, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Am Steiger 3, Haus 1, D-07743 Jena, Germany. E-mail: klaus.rothermund@uni-jena.de. THE ACTIVATION OF SPECIFIC FACETS OF AGE STEREOTYPES DEPENDS ON INDIVIDUATING INFORMATION Catharina Casper and Klaus Rothermund Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Jena, Germany Dirk Wentura Saarland Universität, Germany We investigated the context-dependency of an activation of different age stereotypes, using a sentence priming paradigm in combination with a lexi- cal decision task. In two studies, pictures of young vs. old people were com- bined with sentences describing specific situations and behavioral activities to yield a compound prime comprising category and context information. Significant category priming effects for stereotypic traits (e.g., Slow for an old stimulus person) emerged for matching contexts (e.g., in combination with “she is crossing the street”) but not for irrelevant contexts (e.g., in com- bination with “she is watering the flowers”). In a third and fourth study, explanations of these results in terms of interference effects of irrelevant contexts or of nonmatching age categories were ruled out by showing that neither age information nor matching context information alone leads to an activation of stereotypic traits. Our findings indicate that category informa- tion interacts with individuating information (being in a specific context, engaging in a certain behavioral activity) in activating specific aspects of age stereotypes. Some part of the mental representation of age stereotypes might thus consist in specific schemas that are triggered by a combination of category and individuating information.