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Updated: Aug 1, 2026
06:58
Highlighting and Reducing the Impact of Negative Aging Stereotypes During Older Adults' Cognitive Testing
Published on: January 24, 2020
Can't Read my Broker Face: Learning About Trustworthiness With Age.
Eileen C Rasmussen, Angela Gutchess1
1Department of Psychology, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts.
Summary
Older adults struggle more than younger adults to learn who to trust, with explicit memory playing a key role in investment decisions for both age groups.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Social Cognition
Background:
- Trust learning is crucial for social interactions.
- Age-related differences in social cognition are well-documented.
- Previous research often used faces with pre-existing reputations.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate age-related differences in learning to trust neutral faces.
- To determine the role of explicit memory in trust-based decision-making across the lifespan.
- To examine how learning to trust neutral faces differs between younger and older adults.
Main Methods:
- Participants (younger and older adults) made repeated investment decisions for unfamiliar brokers.
- Broker outcomes (good, neutral, bad) were systematically varied.
- A surprise explicit source memory test assessed recall of broker interactions.
Main Results:
- Both younger and older adults learned to differentiate broker trustworthiness.
- Older adults showed less accurate learning of broker behavior compared to younger adults.
- Explicit source memory strongly correlated with investment decisions, particularly for younger adults.
Conclusions:
- Impaired trust learning in older adults extends to novel, neutral social partners.
- Explicit memory is a significant factor in investment decisions related to trust.
- Future research should explore implicit processes in trust learning across different task demands.
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