Research suggests that bilinguals often outperform monolinguals on tasks that tap into executive functions, such as those requiring conflict resolution and cognitive flexibility. Recently, better attentional control has been detected in infants as young as 6 months, thereby providing a possible basis for a cognitive benefit before language production. The goal of the present study was to examine if cognitive flexibility is more advanced in bilingual infants. A detour reaching task assessing conflict resolution, a delayed response task assessing shifting, and a multiple location task assessing maintaining, were administered to 17-month-old infants. The main findings revealed that being bilingual did not improve performance on any of the executive function tasks. Furthermore, current exposure to a second language or language proficiency did not impact executive functioning. We conclude that a bilingual advantage in cognitive flexibility may not be present before children have enough experience in code switching.
Prevalence-induced concept change describes a cognitive mechanism by which someone’s definition of a concept shifts as the prevalence of instances of that concept changes. While this phenomenon has been established in young adults, it is unclear how it affects older adults. In this study, we explore how prevalence-induced concept change affects older adults’ lower-level, perceptual, and higher-order, ethical, decision-making. We find that older adults are less sensitive to prevalence-induced concept change than younger adults across both domains. Using a combination of computational and experimental approaches, we demonstrate that these age-related changes in judgements are driven by differences in response times between young and old adults, reflecting the time-sensitive and motivation-dependent nature of concept change. Overall, we argue that older adults’ concept spaces may be less flexible than younger adults’ in a changing world, which can make the elderly less sensitive to biases in their judgement.
Previous work suggests that lifespan developmental differences in cognitive control reflect maturational and aging-related changes in prefrontal cortex functioning. However, complementary explanations exist: It could be that children and older adults differ from younger adults in how they balance the effort of engaging in control against its potential benefits. Here we test whether the degree of cognitive effort expenditure depends on the opportunity cost of time (average reward rate per unit time): if the average reward rate is high, participants should withhold cognitive effort whereas if it is low, they should invest more. In Experiment 1, we examine this hypothesis in children, adolescents, younger, and older adults, by applying a reward rate manipulation in two cognitive control tasks: a modified Erikson Flanker and a task-switching paradigm. We found that young adults and adolescents reflexively withheld effort when the opportunity cost of time was high, whereas older adults and, to a lesser degree children, invested more resources to accumulate reward as quickly as possible. We tentatively interpret these results in terms of age- and task-specific differences in the processing of the opportunity cost of time. We qualify our findings in a second experiment in younger adults in which we address an alternative explanation of our results and show that the observed age differences in effort expenditure may not result from differences in task difficulty. To conclude, we think that our results present an interesting first step at relating opportunity costs to motivational processes across the lifespan. We frame the implications of further work in this area within a recent developmental model of resource-rationality, which points to developmental sweet spots in cognitive control.
Prevalence-induced concept change describes a cognitive mechanism by which someone's definition of a concept shifts as the prevalence of instances of that concept changes. The phenomenon has real-world implications because this sensitivity to environmental characteristics may lead to substantial biases in judgements. While prevalence-induced concept change has been established in young adults, it is unclear how it changes as a function of human ageing. In this cross-sectional study, we explore how prevalence-induced concept change affects older adults' lower-level, perceptual, and higher-order, ethical, judgements. We find that older adults are less sensitive to prevalence-induced concept change than younger adults across domains. Using a combination of computational and experimental approaches, we demonstrate that these changes in judgements are sensitive to the pace with which the stimuli occur in the environment and are affected by the effort that subjects invest in order to make accurate decisions. Based on findings from three experiments we argue that older adults' concept spaces are more rigid than those of younger adults. However, what appear as an age-related cognitive "deficit" may turn out to be beneficial because it makes older adults less susceptible to biases in judgments.
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