Lecture 15

Question 1

What happens when we get older?

Answer 1

• Cognitive decline in older age
• Slower processing speed
• Shorter working memory span
• More difficulty inhibiting irrelevant information
• Slower activation of relevant information

Question 2

What is the flanker task?

Answer 2

• Assessment of distinguishing between relevancy
• Had a substance trial where ppts indicate whether central target word is metal or fruit = need to say fruit
• Control test with no flankers, Then do incongruent trials and look at the difference between trials
• Had a valence task where ppts indicate whether central target word is positive or negative, same as above
• RESULTS: older adults’ responses are not affected by interference as long as the words refer to valence, massive interference with substance task
• Younger adults had little interference, and roughly the same level, a little higher in substance
• FMRI results show older adults show effect of incongruent flanking stimuli in substance categorisation task, but not in valence task = middle/inferior frontal gyri
• Younger adults had a much larger signal change for the valence

Question 3

Are older adults’ decision quality influenced by emotion?

Answer 3

• Studied health care decisions that have affective content/consequences, and are at times complex
• Affect heuristic: using overall affective impression can be easier than retrieving individual pieces of info from memory
• Fluid intelligence declines across age but emotional processing is well maintained across age

Question 4

What was a study looking at decision quality and emotion?

Answer 4

• 60 younger, and 60 older adults had to make a series of choices among pairs of health care plans, each option described by series of attributes, presented sequentially (2 or more attributes for each option for each decision)
• One option always has higher no.of pos attributes
• Put ppts into three modes of responding: emotional focus looking at affective impression of each option, information focus looking at individual details, control looking at thinking about everything that comes to mind
• Scoring: chosen alternative is tallied in terms of attribute values
• RESULTS: older adults report more reliance on feelings, less focus on details, and perform better than younger people in the control, younger people pay more attention to information

Question 5

Why is decision quality influenced by emotion?

Answer 5

• Motivational priorities in older age shift from future-oriented to present-oriented emotion regulation
• Cognitive-affective complexity might decline in older age
• Affect heuristic in both groups: people take into account both feelings/info, affect may contribute
• Interventions differ for decision strategy for younger/older

Question 6

What was older adults’ decision making in the IOWA Gambling Task?

Answer 6

• 88 younger adults vs 67 older adults
• Older adults applied equal weight to gains/losses, younger adults apply more weight to losses than gains
• Older adults’ learning parameter show stronger recency effects and more rapid forgetting than younger people
• Net winnings had no difference BUT attenuation of negativity bias in older age and less short term memory resources
• Equal emphasis on pos/neg info in IGT

Question 7

What is the General Cognitive Decline Argument?

Answer 7

• Older adults should be inferior in decision making
• Evidence: less information search, more errors in probability learning but not worse decisions
• More consistent choice behaviour in older than younger adults

Question 8

What was a study looking at the cognitive decline argument?

Answer 8

• Yard sale task, n rounds of sales, where three objects are being sold in each sale (ppt presented with three offers) = 120 in this study
• Single Deal Strategy: first offer in each round is always rejected
• Multiple Deal Strategy: first offer is taken if it surpasses deals in previous rounds
• Offers in all rounds are randomly generated around a common mean
• Both strats lead to equal monetary gain on average
• RESULTS:
• Larger working memory span in younger than older ppts
• Older use Simple strat more often, younger accent first offer more often after initial rounds
• Strat in older ppts appears to be adaptive to working memory limitation

Question 9

How can motivational manipulations reduce age differences?

Answer 9

• Health-related decisions arise more frequently in older age AND are emotionally laden and unpleasant as health is hard to trade
• Older adults may be more susceptible to emotional aspects of decision making
• Older adults prefer to process emotionally salient materials and more pos than neg material
• Not simple heuristics because older adults with well-preserved cognitive abilities show more positivity bias

Question 10

What was a study looking at motivational manipulations reducing age differences in positivity bias?

Answer 10

• Looked at 60 younger and 60 older adults
• Looked at different doctors and attributes of doctors, same for different plans of healthcare
• Control condition where there was no particular instruction or to focus on specific facts and details
• Control condition: older adults review more pos than neg information, recall of chosen alternatives is more positives in older adults

Question 11

Why can motivational manipulations reduce age differences in positivity bias?

Answer 11

• All ppts saw options less positive when working in the information-focus condition
• Older adults are able to override their positive bias when motivational constraints are in place
• Limited future time perspective associated with greater positive bias in older sample
• No age differences in number of cells reviewed or revisited
• Strategies in older people not necessarily less complex