Research Project
6317438
The ability to acquire and use knowledge about the relationships or contingencies that exist between events in the environment is the foundation of adaptive behavior, enabling us to predict, explain, and control the events in our lives. Given the importance of this information for behavioral adaptation, even small age-related declines in sensitivity to environmental contingencies could lead to less adjustment in novel situations and to restrictions in everyday activities. The acquisition and use of contingency information involves fundamental learning and memory processes that are known to change with age. This research addresses the question of whether these changes produce specific patterns of impaired and intact performance in older adults' contingency learning and judgment. Three studies are proposed. The first two studies focus on "data-driven" contingency judgments that follow the acquisition of novel event relationships. The experiments in Study 1 investigate whether age-related decline in working memory resources affects older adults' ability to acquire and use novel contingency information and whether reducing demands for working memory at encoding and retrieval improves this ability. The experiments in Study 2 investigate whether age-related changes in explicit learning and memory processes lead older adults to experience greater deficits in the explicit acquisition and recollection of novel contingency information than in the implicit acquisition and use of this information as a basis for improving performance. The experiments in Study 3 focus on "theory-driven" contingency judgments. These experiments examine whether an age-related decline in the ability to inhibit the intrusion of pre-existing beliefs and expectancies leads older adults to assign greater weight to their own potentially obsolete or irrelevant contingency knowledge than to novel environmental contingencies. Together, the experiments in these three studies will provide a comprehensive view of older adults' ability to acquire, retrieve, and use contingency information for judgment and prediction.
