Life span theories postulate that altruistic tendencies increase in adult development, but the mechanisms and moderators of age-related differences in altruism are poorly understood. In particular, it is unclear to what extent age differences in altruism reflect age differences in altruistic motivation, in resources such as education and income, or in socially desirable responding. This meta-analysis combined 16 studies assessing altruism in younger and older adults (N ϭ 1,581). As expected, results revealed an age-related difference in altruism (M g ϭ 0.61, p Ͻ .001), with older adults showing greater altruism than younger adults. Demographic moderators (income, education, sex distribution) did not significantly moderate this effect, nor did aspects of the study methodology that may drive socially desirable responding. However, the age effect was moderated by the average age of the older sample, such that studies with young-old samples showed a larger age effect than studies with old-old samples. These findings are consistent with the theoretical prediction of age-related increases in altruistic motivation, but they also suggest a role for resources (e.g., physical, cognitive, social) that may decline in advanced old age.
Normal aging is associated with a reduction in the selectivity of cognitive processes such as attention and memory. This loss of selectivity is attributed to diminished inhibition and cognitive control mechanisms in older adults, which render them more susceptible to distraction and more likely to attend to and encode irrelevant information. However, motivational selectivity appears largely preserved in aging.For example, older adults selectively avoid high-demand tasks, exhibit a positivity bias in attention and memory, and show better memory for high-value compared to low-value information. The aim of this review is to integrate these seemingly paradoxical findings of reduced and preserved selectivity in aging, discuss potential neural mechanisms, and propose questions for future research.
Long-term memory is sensitive to both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, but little is known about the relative influence of these two sources of motivation on memory performance across the adult life span. The study examined the effects of extrinsic motivation, manipulated via monetary reward, and curiosity, a form of intrinsic motivation, on long-term memory in healthy younger and older adults. During the incidental encoding phase on Day 1, 60 younger and 53 older participants viewed high-and low-curiosity trivia items as well as unrelated face stimuli. Half of the participants in each age group received financial rewards for correctly guessing trivia answers. On Day 2, participants completed a trivia recall test and an old-new recognition test for the face stimuli. Both curiosity and reward were associated with enhanced trivia recall, but the effects were interactive, such that only low-curiosity items benefitted from monetary reward. Neither curiosity nor reward affected face recognition performance in either age group. These findings indicate that the individual and joint effects of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation on long-term memory are relatively preserved in healthy aging, a finding that highlights the viability of motivational strategies for memory enhancement into old age. Identifying conditions under which memory for unrelated information benefits from motivational spillover effects in younger and older adults is a priority for future research.
Hyper-binding refers to the spontaneous formation of target-distractor associations in older adults, with consequences for subsequent memory. While hyper-binding reflects a loss of attentional and mnemonic selectivity in aging, a growing literature suggests that motivational states modulate cognitive performance in both younger and older adults. In the current study, healthy younger and older adults (N = 48 in both age groups) completed a face-name hyper-binding task with or without motivational incentives during incidental encoding. Results revealed a motivation-related decrease in hyper-binding in older adults, leading to a paradoxical motivation-related memory decrement in this age group. These findings suggest that reward motivation can counteract age-related deficits in inhibition and attentional selectivity, without necessarily boosting memory performance.
The study was conducted to examine the individual and joint effects of extrinsic motivation, manipulated via monetary reward, and curiosity, a form of intrinsic motivation, on long-term memory in the context of a trivia paradigm, in healthy younger and older adults. During the incidental encoding phase on Day 1, 60 younger and 53 older participants viewed high- and low-curiosity trivia as well as unrelated face stimuli. Half of the participants in each age group received financial rewards for correctly guessing trivia answers. On Day 2, participants completed old-new recognition tests for trivia and face stimuli. Both curiosity and reward were associated with enhanced trivia recall, but the effects were interactive, such that only low-curiosity items benefitted from monetary reward. Neither curiosity nor reward affected face recognition performance in either age group. This pattern was similar for younger and older adults. The current data indicate that individual and joint effects of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation on long-term memory are relatively preserved in healthy aging, a finding that highlights the viability of motivational strategies for memory enhancement into old age. Identifying conditions under which memory for unrelated information benefits from motivational spillover effects is a priority for future research.
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