Jang Hyesue, Lin Ziyong, Lustig Cindy
Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States.
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for Lifespan Psychology, Berlin, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2020 Jul 15;11:1489. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01489. eCollection 2020.
Incentives are usually expected to increase motivation and cognitive control and to thereby improve performance. A small but growing number of studies have begun to investigate whether the effects of incentive on cognitive performance differ for younger vs. older adults. Most have used attention and cognitive control paradigms, trial-wise implementation of incentive condition, and gain incentives (reward), with only a very few investigating the effects of loss incentives. The present study takes a complementary approach: We tested younger and older adults in a working memory paradigm with loss incentives implemented session-wide (between subjects). We also included self-report measures to ask how loss incentive affected participants' perceptions of the mental demand of the task, as well as their perceived effort, frustration, motivation, distraction, and metacognitive judgments of how well they had performed. This allowed us to test the disparate predictions of different theoretical views: the intuitive hypothesis that incentive should increase motivation and performance, the motivational shift proposal that older adults are especially motivated to avoid losses (Freund and Ebner, 2005), a heuristic "positivity effect" perspective that older adults ignore losses (Brassen et al., 2012; Williams et al., 2017), and a more nuanced view that suggests that when negative information is unavoidable and increases perceived costs, older adults may instead disengage from the situation (Charles, 2010; Hess, 2014). The results seemed most consistent with the more nuanced view of the positivity effect. While neither group showed incentive-related performance differences, both younger and older adults reported greater perceived demand and frustration under loss incentive, especially in the most challenging conditions. Loss incentive increased the accuracy of immediate metacognitive judgments, but reduced the accuracy of later, more global judgments of competency for older adults. Self-report measures suggested that the loss incentive manipulation was distracting to young adults and demotivating for older adults. The results suggest a need for caution in generalizing from existing studies to everyday life, and that additional studies parameterizing critical aspects of task design and incentive manipulation are needed to fully understand how incentives affect cognition and motivation in younger and older adults.
通常认为，激励措施能够增强动机和认知控制能力，从而提高表现。越来越多的小型研究开始探究激励措施对年轻人和老年人认知表现的影响是否存在差异。大多数研究采用了注意力和认知控制范式、逐次试验实施激励条件以及增益激励（奖励），只有极少数研究考察了损失激励的影响。本研究采用了一种互补的方法：我们在工作记忆范式中对年轻人和老年人进行测试，在整个实验环节（被试间）实施损失激励。我们还纳入了自我报告测量，询问损失激励如何影响参与者对任务心理需求的感知，以及他们感知到的努力程度、沮丧程度、动机、分心程度，以及他们对自身表现的元认知判断。这使我们能够检验不同理论观点的不同预测：直观假设认为激励应增强动机和表现；动机转移提议认为老年人特别有动力避免损失（弗罗因德和埃布纳，2005年）；启发式“积极效应”观点认为老年人忽略损失（布拉森等人，2012年；威廉姆斯等人，2017年）；以及一种更细致入微的观点，即当负面信息不可避免且增加感知成本时，老年人可能会从这种情况中脱离出来（查尔斯，2010年；赫斯，2014年）。结果似乎最符合对积极效应更细致入微的观点。虽然两组在与激励相关的表现上均未显示出差异，但年轻人和老年人在损失激励下均报告感知到更高的需求和更大的沮丧感，尤其是在最具挑战性的条件下。损失激励提高了即时元认知判断的准确性，但降低了老年人后期对能力的更全面判断的准确性。自我报告测量表明，损失激励操作会分散年轻人的注意力，并削弱老年人的动机。结果表明，从现有研究推广到日常生活时需要谨慎，并且需要更多对任务设计和激励操作的关键方面进行参数化的研究，以全面了解激励如何影响年轻人和老年人的认知与动机。
