title: When and why do old adults outsource control to the environment?
abstract: Old adults' tendency to rely on information present in the environment rather than internal representations has been frequently noted, but is not well understood. The fade-out paradigm provides a useful model situation to study this internal-to-external shift across the life span: Subjects need to transition from an initial, cued task-switching phase to a fade-out phase where only 1 task remains relevant. Old adults exhibit large response-time "fade-out costs," mainly because they continue to consult the task cues. Here we show that age differences in fade-out costs remain very large even when we insert between the task-switching and the fade-out phase 20 single-task trials without task cues (during which even old adults' performance becomes highly fluent; Experiment 1), but costs in old adults are eliminated when presenting an on-screen instruction to focus on the 1 remaining task at the transition point between the task-switching and fade-out phase (Experiment 2). Furthermore, old adults, but not young adults, also exhibited "fade-in costs" when they were instructed to perform an initial single-task phase that would be followed by the cued task-switching phase (Experiment 3). Combined, these results show that old adults' tendency to overutilize external support is not a problem of perseverating earlier-relevant control settings. Instead, old adults seem less likely to initiate the necessary reconfiguration process when transitioning from 1 phase to the next because they use underspecified task models that lack the higher-level distinction between those contexts that do and that do not require external support.
authors.affiliation: University of Oregon.
authors.forename: Ulrich
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Mayr
authors.affiliation: Georgia Institute of Technology.
authors.forename: Daniel H
authors.initials: DH
authors.lastname: Spieler
authors.affiliation: Georgia Institute of Technology.
authors.forename: Thomas G
authors.initials: TG
authors.lastname: Hutcheon
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D003463:Cues; D003657:Decision Making; D004777:Environment; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007389:Internal-External Control; D008297:Male; D008960:Models, Psychological; D011930:Reaction Time; D055815:Young Adult