The present study examined age differences in the within-person daily associations of basic cognition, everyday cognition, and busyness with forgetting to take medication. The authors extend previous interindividual difference findings by conducting a daily diary study of a baseline assessment and 8 consecutive days of 40 older adults (age = 60-89 years, M = 74.86) and 31 younger adults (age = 18-20 years, M = 18.30) where basic cognition, everyday cognition, busyness, and forgetting medication were assessed each day and entered simultaneously into one model. Results from a logistic multilevel model indicated that performance on Letter Series was beneficial for both age groups, but the role of fluctuations in busyness on forgetting to take medications was opposite for younger and older adults. Younger adults remembered to take their medication the most on days when they had high everyday cognition and were busier. Older adults remembered to take their medication the most on days when they had high everyday cognition but were less busy. These findings highlight the importance of contextual variation in busyness in relation to daily medication adherence for younger and older adults.

No abstract

One of the biggest challenges in security is human behavior, which with one poor decision can easily bypass even the most secure encryption. This is particularly true for mobile devices, which are now part of the full range of human activity. Our project seeks to discover the conditions under which mobile users are most likely to make security errors, so that we may offer timely encouragement toward safe mobile behavior. Our earlier work indicated that any condition causing stress may increase insecure behavior, with the cause of that stress being relatively unimportant. We therefore focused on multitasking, and asked participants to choose applications to install on the phone, a particularly important security decision. Participants experienced more stress and made more security errors when multi-tasking. This suggests that when mobile users are multi-tasking, designers might create especially effective warnings and guards against error.