Social incentives improve deliberative but not procedural learning in older adults

Abstract

Age-related deficits are seen across tasks where learning depends on asocial feedback processing, however plasticity has been observed in some of the same tasks in social contexts suggesting a novel way to attenuate deficits. Socioemotional selectivity theory suggests this plasticity is due to a deliberative motivational shift toward achieving well-being with age (positivity effect) that reverses when executive processes are limited (negativity effect). The present study examined the interaction of feedback valence (positive, negative) and social salience (emotional face feedback – happy; angry, asocial point feedback – gain; loss) on learning in a deliberative task that challenges executive processes and a procedural task that does not. We predict that angry face feedback will improve learning in a deliberative task when executive function is challenged. We tested two competing hypotheses regarding the interactive effects of deliberative emotional biases on automatic feedback processing: (1) If deliberative emotion regulation and automatic feedback are interactive we expect happy face feedback to improve learning and angry face feedback to impair learning in older adults because cognitive control is available. (2) If deliberative emotion regulation and automatic feedback are not interactive we predict that emotional face feedback will not improve procedural learning regardless of valence. Results demonstrate that older adults show persistent deficits relative to younger adults during procedural category learning suggesting that deliberative emotional biases do not interact with automatic feedback processing. Interestingly, a subgroup of older adults identified as potentially using deliberative strategies tended to learn as well as younger adults with angry relative to happy feedback, matching the pattern observed in the deliberative task. Results suggest that deliberative emotional biases can improve deliberative learning, but have no effect on procedural learning.

Psychosocial Modulators of Motor Learning in Parkinson’s Disease

“…In regards to how emotions influence motor learning, the evidence coming from these studies does not provide a clear picture. For instance, some authors found that emotional learning context did not improve procedural learning (Onal-Hartmann et al, 2012 ; Gorlick and Maddox, 2015 ), although it seemed to modulate sequence awareness in an implicit motor sequence learning task (Onal-Hartmann et al, 2012 ), whereas others found that negative emotional context during initial learning stage enhanced motor memory consolidation after a night of sleep (Javadi et al, 2011 ). In addition to being scarce, the research on the role of emotional context on procedural learning does not use ecological paradigms and relies on experimental manipulations “borrowed” from animal models (i.e., based on fear conditioning).…”