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Updated: Jul 12, 2025
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Highlighting and Reducing the Impact of Negative Aging Stereotypes During Older Adults' Cognitive Testing
Published on: January 24, 2020
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Effects of aging on externally cued and internally driven uncertainty representations
Laura E Korthauer1, Elena K Festa2, Zachary T Gemelli3
1Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, Alpert Medical School, Brown University.
Neuropsychology
|November 2, 2023
Summary
Older adults exhibit greater response time slowing with increased uncertainty, particularly when cues are external. This suggests age-related declines in processing both external and internal uncertainty signals.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Human Factors
Background:
- The Hick-Hyman law describes a linear relationship between response time (RT) and information uncertainty.
- The impact of aging on processing uncertainty in choice RT tasks is not fully understood.
- It remains unclear if aging affects externally cued versus internally driven uncertainty processes differently.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate age-related differences in uncertainty representation.
- To characterize how aging affects the processing of internally driven and externally cued uncertainty.
- To utilize a card-sorting task to examine these age-related effects.
Main Methods:
- A card-sorting task was employed to manipulate uncertainty.
- Internally driven uncertainty was varied by changing stimulus probabilities.
- Externally cued uncertainty was manipulated by altering the number of response options.
Main Results:
- Older adults (OA) demonstrated more significant RT slowing than younger adults under increasing uncertainty.
- This age-related slowing was more pronounced in the externally cued condition compared to the internally driven condition.
- OA struggled to differentiate expected from unexpected stimuli at high uncertainty levels in the internally driven condition, unlike younger adults.
Conclusions:
- Findings indicate age-related impairments in processing both bottom-up (externally cued) and top-down (internally driven) uncertainty.
- These disruptions affect the ability to coordinate task-relevant actions in older adults.
- Cognitive performance in older adults correlated with internally driven uncertainty processing but not externally cued uncertainty processing.
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