Older and younger adults show comparable affective compatibility and simon effects

BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: In affective Simon tasks, participants respond to the color of stimuli with positive or negative affect by saying "good" or "bad." The primary finding is that responses are faster when the affective valences of the stimulus and response correspond than when they do not. A similar compatibility effect occurs in an evaluation task for which stimulus affect is relevant and mapped compatibly or incompatibly to the responses.

The present study compared the affective Simon and compatibility effects for younger and older adults in pure-task conditions (all trials from a single task) and mixed-task conditions (trials from the two tasks occurred equally often). Four schematic faces were used as stimuli for the affective Simon task and four different positive and negative images for the evaluation task.

The affective Simon effect was of similar size for older and younger adults under both pure- and mixed-task conditions: Mixed emotion-relevant trials increased the Simon effect when the mapping was compatible but had no influence on it when the mapping was incompatible. Older adults showed a larger affective compatibility effect than younger adults, but only the effect for younger adults was increased substantially by intermixing Simon-task trials.

These results and others imply that automatic activation of corresponding affective responses occurs similarly for older and younger adults, with older adults mainly showing a deficit in intentional processing of incompatible affect mappings. The study provides little evidence that older adults have a general deficit at inhibiting activation by stimuli of their stereotypical responses.