Age Effects in Adaptive Criterion Learning

Cassidy, Brittany S.; Gutchess, Angela H.

doi:10.1093/geronb/gbv039

Cited by 6 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 67 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This age-attributed valence could arise from general age-related performance or criterion biases in decision-making: many older participants express wanting to “do well” in experiments, and responses can tend toward the conservative with age (e.g., Ratcliff et al, 2006; Cassidy and Gutchess, 2015). However, the two-alternative forced-choice procedure used here is criterion-independent (Green and Swets, 1974) and therefore not subject to age-associated criterion biases.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age Affects How Task Difficulty and Complexity Modulate Perceptual Decision-Making

Habak

Seghier

Brûlé

et al. 2019

Front. Aging Neurosci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Decisions differ in difficulty and rely on perceptual information that varies in richness (complexity); aging affects cognitive function including decision-making, and yet, the interaction between difficulty and perceptual complexity have rarely been addressed in aging. Using a parametric fMRI modulation analysis and psychophysics, we address how task difficulty affects decision-making when controlling for the complexity of the perceptual context in which decisions are made. Perceptual complexity was varied in a factorial design while participants made perceptual judgments on the spatial frequency of two patches that either shared the same orientation (simple condition) or were orthogonal in orientation (complex condition). Psychophysical thresholds were measured for each participant in each condition and served to set individualized levels of difficulty during scanning. Findings indicate that discriminability interacts with complexity, to influence decisional difficulty. Modulation as a function of difficulty is maintained with age, as indicated by coupling between increased activation in fronto-parietal regions and suppression in the lateral hubs, however, age has a specific effect in the ventral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), driven by performance at near-threshold (difficult) levels for the simpler stimulus combination condition, but not the more complex one. Taken together, our findings suggest that the context of difficulty, or what is perceived as important, changes with age, and that decisions that would seem neutral to younger participants, may carry more emphasis with age.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age Affects How Task Difficulty and Complexity Modulate Perceptual Decision-Making

Habak

Seghier

Brûlé

et al. 2019

Front. Aging Neurosci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…What are the characteristics of a good criterion shifter? Whereas some studies have suggested factors that may predict criterion placement and shifting, including age (Cassidy & Gutchess, 2015), sensitivity to the strength of one’s own memories (Selmeczy & Dobbins, 2013), and social cues (Cassidy, Dubé, & Gutchess, 2015), what may be more notable are all the factors that do not predict criterion shifting. These include measures of intelligence and executive-functioning skills such as working memory capacity and task-switching ability, as reported by Aminoff and colleagues (2012) in a large-scale study of individual differences that included 95 subjects.…”

Section: The Willingness To Criterion Shiftmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not All People Are Cut Out for Strategic Criterion Shifting

Miller

Kantner

2019

Curr Dir Psychol Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Decisions are often based on memory, but memories are often vague and ambiguous. Therefore, one must establish some standard for how strong a memory must feel before it is accepted as part of one’s past. This standard of evidence, called a decision criterion, should be adapted to the demands of a given situation: Sometimes it is critical to accept only strong memories as legitimate, whereas at other times it is more appropriate to act on the basis of relatively weak memory evidence. The ability to shift between these two standards as circumstances warrant is a critical element of successful decision making. We review recent work examining criterion shifting in recognition memory and argue that the true nature of criterion shifting may be seen only at the individual level: Whereas some people shift their criterion quite adaptively, others do not shift at all.

show abstract

“…In contrast, a more conservation response criterion results in a higher likelihood of reporting that a target is absent. Adaptive response criteria have been observed among older adults in memory tasks (Baron & Surdy, 1990; Cassidy & Gutchess, 2015; Marquié & Baracat, 2000; Pendergrass, Olfman, Schmalstig, Seder, & Light, 2012) and auditory perception (Craik, 1969). In driving, adapting response criteria according to the demand and context of the target detection task may benefit older drivers in detecting road hazards.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive response criteria in road hazard detection among older drivers

Feng

Choi

Craik

et al. 2017

Traffic Injury Prevention

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

OBJECTIVES The majority of existing investigations on attention, aging, and driving have focused on the negative impacts of age-related declines in attention on hazard detection and driver performance. However, driving skills and behavioral compensation may accommodate the negative effects that age-related attentional decline places on driving performance. In this study, we examined an important question that had been largely neglected in the literature linking attention, aging, and driving: can top-down factors such as behavioral compensation, specifically adaptive response criteria, accommodate the negative impacts from age-related attention declines on hazard detection during driving? METHODS In the experiment, we used the Drive Aware Task, a task combining the driving context with well-controlled laboratory procedures measuring attention. We compared younger (n = 16, age 21 – 30) and older drivers (n = 21, age 65 – 79) on their attentional processing of hazards in driving scenes, indexed by percentage of correct and reaction time of hazard detection, as well as sensitivity and response criterion using the signal detection analysis. RESULTS Older drivers, in general, were less accurate and slower on the task than younger drivers. However, results from this experiment also revealed that older, but not younger, drivers adapted their response criteria when the traffic condition changed in the driving scenes. When there was more traffic in the driving scene, older drivers became more liberal in their responses, meaning that they were more likely to report that a driving hazard was detected. CONCLUSIONS Older drivers adopt compensatory strategies on hazard detection during driving . Our findings showed that, in the driving context, even at an old age our attentional functions are still adaptive according to environmental conditions. This leads to considerations on potential training methods to promote adaptive strategies which may help older drivers maintaining performance in road hazard detection.

show abstract

Age Effects in Adaptive Criterion Learning

Abstract: These findings evidence labile adaptive criteria placement and criteria shifting with age. However, age-related tendencies toward conservative response biases may limit the extent to which criteria can be shifted in a lenient direction.

Cited by 6 publications

References 67 publications

Age Affects How Task Difficulty and Complexity Modulate Perceptual Decision-Making

Age Affects How Task Difficulty and Complexity Modulate Perceptual Decision-Making

Not All People Are Cut Out for Strategic Criterion Shifting

Adaptive response criteria in road hazard detection among older drivers

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About