Department of Human Development, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.
J Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci. 2020 Mar 9;75(4):762-771. doi: 10.1093/geronb/gby090.
Many real-life settings require decision makers to sort a predetermined set of outcomes or activities into a preferred sequence and people vary in whether they prefer to tackle the most challenging aspects first, leave them for the last, or intersperse them with less challenging outcomes. Prior research on age differences in sequence-preferences has focused on discrete and hypothetical events. The present study expands this work by examining sequence-preferences for a realistic, continuous, sustained, and cognitively challenging task.
Participants (N = 121, aged 21-86) were asked to complete 10 min of a difficult cognitive task (2-back), 10 min of an easy cognitive task (1-back), and 10 min of rest over the course of a 30-min interval. They could complete the tasks in any order and switch tasks as often as they wished and they were rewarded for correct performance. Additional measures included affective and physiological responses, task accuracy, time-perspective, and demographics.
The majority of participants constructed sequences with decreasing task difficulty. Preferences for the general trend of the sequence were not significantly related to age, but the number of switches among the tasks decreased with age, and task-switching tended to incur greater accuracy decrements among older as compared to younger adults.
We address potential methodological concerns, discuss theoretical implications, and consider potential real-life applications.
许多现实生活场景要求决策者将一组预定的结果或活动按照偏好顺序进行排序，而人们在优先处理最具挑战性的方面、留到最后处理还是穿插处理较不具挑战性的结果方面存在差异。先前关于序列偏好的年龄差异研究主要集中在离散和假设事件上。本研究通过考察现实、连续、持久和认知挑战性任务的序列偏好，扩展了这一工作。
参与者（N=121，年龄 21-86 岁）被要求在 30 分钟的时间间隔内完成 10 分钟的困难认知任务（2 回）、10 分钟的简单认知任务（1 回）和 10 分钟的休息。他们可以按照任何顺序完成任务，并根据需要频繁切换任务，并且正确的表现会得到奖励。其他措施包括情感和生理反应、任务准确性、时间视角和人口统计学。
大多数参与者构建了具有递减任务难度的序列。对序列总体趋势的偏好与年龄没有显著关系，但任务之间的切换次数随年龄的增长而减少，与年轻成年人相比，年龄较大的成年人在任务切换时准确性下降更大。
我们解决了潜在的方法学问题，讨论了理论意义，并考虑了潜在的现实生活应用。
