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Related Experiment Videos

Age differences in attributions to causality: implications for intellectual assessment.

T R Prohaska, I A Parham, J Teitelman

    Experimental Aging Research
    |January 1, 1984
    PubMed
    Summary

    Elderly individuals often expect failure, impacting intellectual performance. This study shows that negative attributions, not just age, affect cognitive test results in older adults.

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    Area of Science:

    • Psychology
    • Cognitive Aging
    • Social Psychology

    Background:

    • Negative attributions and failure expectations can negatively impact intellectual performance in older adults.
    • These factors may act as confounding variables, influencing test outcomes independently of actual ability.

    Purpose of the Study:

    • To investigate how causal attributions for test failure affect intellectual performance in younger and older individuals.
    • To examine the role of negative expectations and attributions as confounding variables in cognitive testing.

    Main Methods:

    • An experimental study involving 80 female participants (40 elderly, 40 younger).
    • Participants experienced noncontingent failure on unsolvable test items, followed by feedback attributing failure to ability, effort, or no cause.

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  • Performance was assessed on solvable intelligence sub-tests (Reasoning, Hidden Patterns, Paper Folding).

    • Main Results:

    • Older subjects reported lower success expectations and performed worse across all intelligence tests.
    • When no specific cause for failure was given, younger subjects showed performance facilitation, while older subjects showed performance deficits.
    • Differential performance was observed in the Paper Folding Test between age groups without experimenter-provided causal attribution.

    Conclusions:

    • Negative attributions and failure expectations significantly impact intellectual performance in older adults.
    • The study supports a contextualistic viewpoint, highlighting how attributions interact with age and performance.
    • Understanding attributional styles is crucial for accurate assessment of cognitive abilities in aging populations.