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

Can Professionals Resist Cognitive Bias Elicited by the Visual System? Reversed Semantic Prime Effect and Decision Making in the Workplace: Reaction Times and Accuracy

Information that comes from the environment reaches the brain-and-body system via sensory inputs that can operate outside of conscious awareness and influence decision processes in different ways. Specifically, decision-making processes can be influenced by various forms of implicit bias derived from individual-related factors (e.g., individual differences in decision-making style) and/or stimulus-related information, such as visual input. However, the relationship between these subjective and objective factors of decision making has not been investigated previously in professionals with varying seniority. This study explored the relationship between decision-making style and cognitive bias resistance in professionals compared with a group of newcomers in organisations. A visual "picture-picture" semantic priming task was proposed to the participants. The task was based on primes and probes' category membership (animals vs. objects), and after an animal prime stimulus presentation, the probe can be either five objects (incongruent condition) or five objects and an animal (congruent condition). Behavioural (i.e., accuracy-ACC, and reaction times-RTs) and self-report data (through the General Decision-Making Scale administration) were collected. RTs represent an indirect measure of the workload and cognitive effort required by the task, as they represent the time it takes the nervous system to receive and integrate incoming sensory information, inducing the body to react. For both groups, the same level of ACC in both conditions and higher RTs in the incongruent condition were found. Interestingly, for the group of professionals, the GDMS-dependent decision-making style negatively correlates with ACC and positively correlates with RTs in the congruent condition. These findings suggest that, under the incongruent decision condition, the resistance to cognitive bias requires the same level of cognitive effort, regardless of seniority. However, with advancing seniority, in the group of professionals, it has been demonstrated that a dependent decision-making style is associated with lower resistance to cognitive bias, especially in conditions that require simpler decisions. Whether this result depends on age or work experience needs to be disentangled from future studies.

Susceptibility to default effects does not differ by age

Decision makers are more likely to passively accept than to actively reject preselected default options. Age differences in such "default effects" have not been systematically examined, but prior research reports age-related variation in several known determinants of default effects suggesting that they may be more common in older as compared to younger adults. To address this question, a representative life span sample (N = 500; Mage = 49.90, SDage = 19.34; 51% female, 49% male; 67% non-Hispanic White) responded to a preregistered online study. Participants completed a default effect task comprising two conditions, one requiring opt-out and one requiring opt-in decisions (i.e., 15 vs. 0 preselected features each). Susceptibility to defaults was assessed as the discrepancy between the number of features selected within each condition. In addition, we collected data on known determinants of default effects (i.e., perceived endowment, endorsement, ease, experience making similar choices, importance of the choice, and affective responses to the choice). Finally, we screened demographic background, personality, socioemotional and health status, and cognitive ability. Susceptibility to default effects was evident both at the individual and the group level. Unlike hypothesized, older age did not predict greater susceptibility to defaults, and older adults were less likely to endorse determinants of default effect compliance. Of the covariates assessed, only identifying as non-Hispanic White, greater perceived endorsement, greater perceived ease, and lower perceived importance of making the right choice predicted decision makers' susceptibility to default effects. Thus, our findings suggest that susceptibility to decision defaults does not vary by age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The role of informational content of visual speech in an audiovisual cocktail party: Evidence from cortical oscillations in young and old participants

Age-related differences in the processing of audiovisual speech in a multi-talker environment were investigated analysing event-related spectral perturbations (ERSPs), focusing on theta, alpha and beta oscillations that are assumed to reflect conflict processing, multisensory integration and attentional mechanisms, respectively. Eighteen older and 21 younger healthy adults completed a two-alternative forced-choice word discrimination task, responding to audiovisual speech stimuli. In a cocktail-party scenario with two competing talkers (located at -15° and 15° azimuth), target words (/yes/or/no/) appeared at a pre-defined (attended) position, distractor words at the other position. In two audiovisual conditions, acoustic speech was combined either with informative or uninformative visual speech. While a behavioural benefit for informative visual speech occurred for both age groups, differences between audiovisual conditions in the theta and beta band were only present for older adults. A stronger increase in theta perturbations for stimuli containing uninformative visual speech could be associated with early conflict processing, while a stronger suppression in beta perturbations for informative visual speech could be associated to audiovisual integration. Compared to the younger group, the older group showed generally stronger beta perturbations. No condition differences in the alpha band were found. Overall, the findings suggest age-related differences in audiovisual speech integration in a multi-talker environment. While the behavioural benefit of informative visual speech was unaffected by age, older adults had a stronger need for cognitive control when processing conflicting audiovisual speech input. Furthermore, mechanisms of audiovisual integration are differently activated depending on the informational content of the visual information.