文章轉錄自Medical News Today（點此連結）；文章主要論述：認知能力可以預測風險決策，而非年齡，因此老年人並未如同刻板印象比較會採取風險迴避、或高風險低品質的決策，雖然老年人的認知能力在記憶與速度上有所減退，但若能給予足夠時間與資訊，仍可做出好的決策（與年輕人相同的決策）。我們對於老年人有什麼刻板印象呢？認知能力是一籠統的詞彙，幾乎涵蓋人類心智的理性能力，包括決策能力（Decision Making），因此認知能力能以預測風險決策，這是可以想像的，文中研究者有排除年齡為中間變項，年齡變項並不會提高預測，在此可以想像，風險決策與個人所採取的「策略」比較有關（也就是一個人的背景、知識與經驗）；因此，在實務上使用年齡訊息來詮釋一個人時，要更為小心；此外，認知能力、心智能力與年齡之間的關係，應該值得心理學仔細思考（譬如幾歲才算心智成熟）。曾有新聞報導，幾位老年人多次被金光黨詐騙，新聞的操作點在於金光黨的不仁不義竟向判斷力不佳的老人下手，但若依照這則研究，可能就會問，為什麼有些老人就不會被騙、而有些人卻會？而這恐怕已跟年齡沒太大關連了。
Cognitive Ability, Not Age, Predicts Risky Decisions
02 Jun 2010
Just because your mother has turned 85, you shouldn't assume you'll
have to take over her financial matters. She may be just as good or
better than you at making quick, sound, money-making decisions,
according to researchers at Duke University.
"It's not age, it's cognition that makes the difference in
decision-making," said Scott Huettel, Ph.D., Associate Professor of
psychology and neuroscience and director of the Duke Center for
Neuroeconomic Studies. He recently led a laboratory study in which
participants could gain or lose money based on their decisions.
"Once we accounted for cognitive abilities like memory and processing
speed, age had nothing to do with predicting whether an individual would
make the best economic decisions on the tasks we assigned," Huettel
said.
The study was published in the Psychology and Aging journal,
published by the American Psychological Association.
Duke researchers assigned a variety of economic tasks that required
different types of risky decisions, so that participants could gain or
lose real money. They also tested subjects' cognitive abilities -
including both how fast they could process new information and how well
they could remember that information. They worked with 54 older adults
between 66 and 76 years of age and 58 younger adults between 18 and 35
years of age. .
The researchers used path analysis, a statistical method of finding
cause-and-effect relationships, to determine whether age affected the
economic decisions directly or whether it had indirect effects, such as
age influencing memory, which in turn influenced decisions.
"The standard perspective is that age itself causes people to make more
risky, lower-quality decisions - independent of the cognitive changes
associated with age," said Huettel, who is also with the Duke-UNC Brain
Imaging and Analysis Center. "But that isn't what we found."
The path analyses showed that age-related effects were apparently linked
to individual differences in processing speed and memory. When those
variables were included in the analysis, age was no longer a significant
predictor of decision quality, Huettel said.
On a bell curve of performance, there was overlap between the younger
and older groups. Many of the older subjects, aged 66 to 76, made
similar decisions to many of the younger subjects (aged 18 to 35). "The
stereotype of all older adults becoming more risk-averse is simply
wrong," Huettel said.
"Some of the older subjects we studied were able to make better
decisions than younger subjects who scored lower on tests of their
cognitive abilities," Huettel said. "If I took 20 younger adults and 20
older adults, all of whom were above average on these measures, then on
average, you could not tell them apart based on decisions. On the whole,
it is true, more older people process slowly and has poorer memory. But
there are also older people who do as well as younger people."
Huettel said that the findings suggest strategies to assist people, such
as allowing more time for decisions, or presenting data in certain ways
to assist people in making decisions.
"Decision scaffolding is the concept that you can give people structure
for decision-making that helps them," Huettel said. "We should try to
identify ways in which to present information to older adults that gives
them scaffolding to make the best choices. If we can reduce the demand
on memory or the need to process information very quickly that would be a
great benefit to older adults and may push them toward making the same
economically beneficial decisions as younger adults."
In reality, younger adults more often work to obtain credit cards with
lower interest rates and lower interest rates on mortgages, for example.
Huettel said that using surveys that track real-world behavior might
help to identify who would benefit from getting information in one
manner versus another.
"Some younger adults, too, may benefit from getting their information in
a slow, methodical way, while others may not," Huettel said. "We may be
able to predict that based on cognition." Self-recognition is
important, too, so that if someone knows they process things well over
time, they might ask for more time to make a decision rather than making
an impulsive decision on the spot, he added.
Other authors included lead author Debra Menninger, who was with Duke
but is now at CIGNA in the department of valuation & evaluation
informatics, and David J. Madden, Ph.D., from the Duke Center for the
Study of Aging and Human Development and the Duke department of
psychiatry. The work was supported by NIH grants.
Source:
Mary Jane Gore
Duke University Medical Center
Article URL: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/190641.php
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