The role of cognitive costs, attitudes about aging, and intrinsic motivation in predicting engagement in everyday activities.

Abstract

Engagement in cognitively demanding everyday activities has been shown to benefit cognitive health in later life. We investigated the factors that influence engagement, with specific interest in determining the extent to which the costs of engaging cognitive resources are associated with intrinsic motivation and, ultimately, participation in everyday activities. Older adults (N = 153) aged from 65 to 81 years completed a challenging cognitive task, with the costs of cognitive engagement-operationalized as the effort required to maintain performance-assessed using systolic blood pressure responses (SBP-R). We also assessed participation in everyday activities using both 2-year retrospective reports and five daily reports over a 5-week period. Structural models revealed that lower levels of costs were associated with more positive attitudes about aging, which in turn were associated with higher levels of intrinsic motivation. Motivation was subsequently predictive of everyday activity engagement, with the effect being specific to those activities thought to place demands on cognitive resources. The measure of engagement had minimal impact on the nature of the observed effects, suggesting that the retrospective and weekly assessments were tapping into similar constructs. Taken together, the results are consistent with expectations derived from Selective Engagement Theory (Hess, 2014), which argues that engagement in demanding activities is related to the cost associated with such engagement, which in turn leads to selective participation through changes in motivation. (PsycINFO Database Record

Losing Money and Motivation: Effects of Loss Incentives on Motivation and Metacognition in Younger and Older Adults

“…One way to differentiate these ideas while controlling for task difficulty might be, e.g., comparing rare-response vs. frequent-response versions of the same attention task (c.f., Staub et al, 2015 ), or varying retention intervals in a working-memory task. This kind of task analysis and testing of parameters and boundary conditions may be an important direction for future research, especially as many real-world tasks are relatively unconstrained (e.g., reading, writing, participating in a conversation, driving) and thus may rely more on the top–down, self-initiated aspects of attention ( Hess et al, 2011 , 2018 ).…”

Losing Money and Motivation: Effects of Loss Incentives on Motivation and Metacognition in Younger and Older Adults

“…This kind of task analysis and testing of parameters and boundary conditions may be an important direction for future research, especially as many real-world tasks are relatively unconstrained (e.g., reading, writing, participating in a conversation, driving) and thus may rely more on the top-down, self-initiated aspects of attention (Hess, Emery, & Neupert, 2011;Hess, Growney, O'Brien, Neupert, & Sherwood, 2018).…”

BFF: Bayesian, Fiducial, and Frequentist Analysis of Cognitive Engagement among Cognitively Impaired Older Adults

“…Systolic blood pressure responsivity (SBP-R) is a useful index of engagement or required costs (e.g., [ 3 , 4 ]), and has been positively associated with objective levels of task difficulty in cognitively healthy older adults (e.g., [ 5 , 6 ]). SBP-R may reflect cardiovascular health, cardiovascular reactivity to stress, or cardiovascular responsivity to cognitive engagement [ 7 ].…”

“…SBP-R may reflect cardiovascular health, cardiovascular reactivity to stress, or cardiovascular responsivity to cognitive engagement [ 7 ]. Further, effortful engagement as indexed by SBP-R is associated with motivation to engage (e.g., [ 3 , 8 ]). There are also age differences in SBP-R during various laboratory tasks, with older adults demonstrating higher reactivity (for review, see [ 9 ]), which according to the Strength and Vulnerability Integration model [ 10 ] may present an obstacle to older adults’ information processing.…”

“…It is less clear, however, the extent to which cognitively impaired individuals engage in active coping when exposed to cognitive stressors. Although aging is associated with predictable increases in SBP-R (e.g., [ 3 ]), higher cognitive costs, the experience of which are common in impaired older adults, are associated with lower motivation and engagement (e.g., [ 3 , 12 ]). In addition to cognitive resources, an examination of physical and mental health resources and stress levels as potential moderators is a crucial component to our understanding of SBP-R in cognitively impaired older adults.…”