Aging and Selective Engagement: The Moderating Impact of Motivation on Older Adults' Resource Utilization

Abstract

Two studies were conducted to examine age differences in the impact of motivation in a social cognitive task. We tested the hypothesis that aging is associated with an increase in the selective engagement of cognitive resources in support of performance. Different-aged adults read descriptions of 2 people in order to determine which was better suited for a particular job. These descriptions contained behaviors that were either consistent or inconsistent with the job, and participants performed the task under conditions of high versus low accountability. Examination of memory for behavioral information revealed that accountability disproportionately affected older adults' performance, with the locus of this effect being in conscious recollection processes. This supports the aforementioned selective engagement hypothesis by demonstrating that the differential impact of the motivational manipulation was based in deliberative memory processes.

The impact of age and motivation on cognitive effort: Implications for cognitive engagement in older adulthood.

“…This is consistent with the idea that greater costs associated with cognitive activity increases older adults’ sensitivity to task demands and the self-implications of the task, resulting in greater selectivity in terms of engagement of resources and a generally closer linkage between behavior and motivational factors than observed in younger adults. Significantly, the present results extend previous support for this hypothesis based primarily in behavioral outcomes (e.g., Germain & Hess, 2007; Hess et al, 2001, 2009) by demonstrating such selectivity at its prime locus: effort expenditure. Although previous demonstrations of disproportionate performance enhancements (e.g., memory [Hess et al, 2009]) for older adults when motivation was high were consistent with the notion of selective engagement of cognitive resources, our finding of a similar linkage involving SBP provides stronger evidence.…”

Assessment of adult age differences in task engagement: The utility of systolic blood pressure

“…Specifically, participants were either given standard task instructions or informed that the experimenter would review their performance with them at the end of each trial block. Accountability manipulations have been found to increase engagement by heightening self-presentation concerns (see Lerner & Tetlock, 1999), and several studies have found that such instructions have a stronger effect on task performance in older than in younger adults (e.g., Hess, Germain, Swaim, & Osowski, 2009; Hess, Rosenberg, & Waters, 2001). Consistent with expectations, participants in the high accountability condition exhibited higher levels of SBP-R than did those in the low accountability condition, with the impact of accountability being greater in the old than in the young group.…”

Use of immersive virtual reality to assess episodic memory: A validation study in older adults

“…The degree of motivation towards the task might be particularly relevant when designing VR environments, as motivation optimises performance and is related to resource allocation in older adults (Hess, 1994;Hess, Germain, Swaim, & Osowski, 2009;Hess, Popham, Emery, & Elliott, 2012). Because older adults are generally less technologically experienced, one might expect them to be less motivated by VR than by non-VR tasks.…”