Older adults’ interactive behaviors during collaboration on everyday problems: Linking process and outcome

Abstract

Adult collaborative cognition research suggests that working with a partner is generally beneficial to performance; however, little research has investigated the relation between the interactive behaviors and collaborative outcome. The present study examined four interactive behaviors exhibited by familiar (i.e., married spouses) and unfamiliar (i.e., other-sex strangers) older adult dyads during collaborative performance on an everyday problem-solving measure. Results indicated that (a) interactive behaviors were related to partner familiarity and whether dyads first attempted the problems individually or collaboratively, (b) the nature of the interactive behaviors differed over the course of task completion, and (c) interactive behaviors were linked to performance outcome.

Factors Affecting Reliability and Validity of Self-Directed Automatic In Situ Audiometry: Implications for Self-Fitting Hearing Aids

“…Failure to involve the partner in the automatic audiometry task may also have stemmed from a breakdown in action 2: the active solicitation of partner assistance by the participant. Despite extensive literature suggesting that for older adults, collaboration improves the achieved outcome across a variety of task domains (e.g., Dixon and Gould, 1998;Berg et al, 2007;Kimbler and Margrett, 2009), collaborative efforts to complete the automatic in situ audiometry task did not occur to the expected degree. A major contributor to this outcome may be the constraints imposed by the study protocol on how the participant and partner could interact.…”

Private Speech in Illiterate Adults: Cognitive Functions, Task Difficulty, and Literacy

“…As researchers have noted, in social settings, both social speech and externalized PS have task and regulatory functions (Centeno-Cortés and Jimenez 2004;De Guerrero 1994, 2004McCafferty 1994). Other studies have pointed out the relevance of social speech in adults while working in collaborative problem-solving tasks (Dixon et al 1997;Kimbler and Margrett 2009;Meegan and Berg 2002). In a collaborative situation, every statement, social and private, may have a regulatory role for the listener and the speaker, serving to focus the attention of the participants in the new information to solve the problem (Antón and DiCamilla 1998;DiCamilla and Antón 2004;Frawley and Lantolf 1985;Lantolf and Frawley 1984).…”

Evaluation of the Self-Fitting Process with a Commercially Available Hearing Aid

“…We expected that partner involvement in the selffitting procedure would benefit our participants. Collaboration on problem-solving tasks has been shown to improve outcomes for older adults (Berg et al, 2007;Kimbler and Margrett, 2009) due to presumed compensatory effects on the cognitive declines associated with aging (Dixon, 1996;Dixon and Gould, 1996). Participants in all previous self-fitting studies were encouraged to attend with a partner, but constraints were placed on how they could interact (Convery et al, 2011;2015).…”