Age-Related Declines - Outline Example

29 November Research Summary: Critical Question: What questions are the researcher(s) interested in answering? Age-related declines in cognitive or information acquisition are common. But, researchers in this study are interested in establishing how those age differences in memory contribute to task performance, if at all. It is a common assumption that older adults are less capable than younger adults in effective monitoring of information. The researchers are interested in finding out the extent to which this assumption could be held true. Previous research has often highlighted a relationship between age differences and task performance. Yet, the validity of this relationship has not been proven which leaves it surrounded by ambiguity. In this study, the researchers attempt to illustrate the reality of this famous assumption and dig with acute intelligence into metacognition. They are interested in answering if age differences in this metacognition affect task performance in two groups of older and younger adults. The researchers are also interested in finding out if older adults stand in contrast with younger adults in context of goals oriented acquisition. This difference has not been researched before and nothing concrete can be found about it in previous research. The researchers here take the research study to the next level by presenting more stringent and less stringent recall goals to older and younger adults. This is done in hopes to answer the question if any age difference in memory recalls actually exists or is it just another assumption. This attempt to find out the reason for which older adults differ from younger adults in the way they respond to cognitive goals or recall goals is one of the hallmarks of this research study. The goal is not only to establish age differences in responsiveness to recall goals. Besides proving, the researchers are also interested in finding out why these differences in metacognition exist and why they affect the way people handle task control and computational demands. Hypothesis: What position do the author(s) take with respect to this question? The researchers hypothesized that if older adults struggle in allocating their resources properly for reading text during less stringent recall goals, they would most probably allocate time quite disproportionately in reading text during more stringent recall goals. This hypothesis is reinforced by the fact that text became increasingly difficult and complex during more stringent recall goals when older and young adults were tested for efficiency. It is hypothesized that more time would be improperly allocated to reading by not younger, but older adults for the more stringent cognitive goal which is related to efficiency. It is hypothesized that a reduced responsiveness to recall goals would be seen between the two groups of adults included in the study. The authors also hypothesize that if there are age differences in performance related to metacognitive control, then one can also expect differences between two age groups in task performance since difficulty with metacognitive control should also affect performance in older readers. Compared to high-accuracy recall goals, the researchers hypothesized that older readers would have to struggle more or would face more difficulty in coping with the high-efficiency recall goals. They also expected that compared to younger adults, older adults due to probable existence of age-related differences would show more signs of struggle in context of text processing. If older adults are able to perform just as well as younger adults when the goal stresses accuracy, the researchers assumed that younger adults would surpass older adults when the goal would stress efficiency. Experiments are conducted by researchers to verify if the results happen to be consistent with these ideas. Methodology: What method do the researcher(s) use to investigate the critical questions? Qualitative research is the methodology used in this study by the researchers to investigate the critical questions related to adults’ learning styles and approaches taken to reading. This research method is wisely chosen by the researchers because it allowed them to carry on a detailed recording of the research participants’ skills and behaviours. It helped to appreciate in a better way why older and younger adults acted in specific ways when given different kinds of tasks to complete. 33 older and 40 younger adults were included in the study. Older adults aged 51 to 80 and younger adults aged 19 to 26 were chosen for research experiments. English was a native language of all research participants and before including them in the experiments, they were screened for any impairments. Caucasians formed the majority of research participants. Older and younger adults were separately tested on basis of both reading and listening tasks. In order to confirm or disregard any difference between older and younger adults according to metamemory along seven dimensions, research participants were given the MIA questionnaire which stands for metamemory in adulthood. This tool allowed to assess metamemory of participants along strategy, task, capacity, change, anxiety, achievement, and locus. Design: Briefly detail how the researcher(s) conducted their experiment. The researchers benefited from a solid research design to conduct their experiment. A 3*2 research design was used to investigate sentence complexity and goal in subjects. Along one dimension of this design, density on three levels was tested, low, medium and high. Along the other dimension, recall goals on two levels were tested, accuracy and efficiency. Two types of recalls were used. One was highly stringent and other was kept less stringent. One recall was high on accuracy and other was high on efficiency. So, research participants were tested separately for both accuracy and efficiency to investigate how they responded to different types of recall goals according to their ages. Sentences used in reading materials covered different topics and did not differ much in context of lexical and syntactic complexity. Because these sentences were quite similar in complexity, it became important to bring the element of variability in difficulty level. In order to address this requirement to stimulate participants, a set of low-density, medium-density, and high-density sentences was used. Sentences were not confusing, rather they varied in difficulty level to ensure that participants respond to them in different ways. This was done to establish if younger and older adults would behave and respond to reading and listening materials according to common assumptions or if research-based reality would present a different story. Results: What did the researchers find? Don’t embellish or use figurative language. As expected, research participants, older and younger adults alike, used their resource of time in the same way when presented with recall goal of accuracy. Both groups allocated more time to reading this time than when subjected to the efficiency recall goal. As hypothesized, younger and older adults did not show much difference in reading material given to them during this goal. Both responded to reading and allocated their time more or less the same way. This means that this task condition or a task of this nature did not help to bring out the effect of age. No influence of age difference was reported for this task condition. Contrary to what was hypothesized by the researchers regarding the efficiency recall goal, older adults were not as responsive to it as younger adults. The researchers expected that compared to younger adults, older adults will face more difficulty in coping with the requirements of efficiency goal. So, they would probably try to take less time in reading when tested for efficiency. On the other hand, results revealed that older adults allocated more time to reading than younger adults in the efficiency condition. They responded to this condition more or less the same way in which they responded to the accuracy test. A difference in time allocation was noticed for the accuracy and efficiency recall goals, but this difference proved to be larger for younger adults and minimal for older adults. Younger adults took less time to read than older adults in efficiency test. This suggests that regardless of the nature of recall goal, older adults followed their own course. Their time allocation policy was unresponsive, inflexible, or less sensitive to the linguistic processes underlying reading material. This is an age-related difference which proves the hypothesis that older and younger adults differ in the way they respond to accuracy and efficiency tests. Another main effect of age was noticed when younger adults were able to recall more information than older adults. Though both younger and older adults were able to recall more after accuracy recall goal as compared to the other goal, but recall performance was higher for younger adults in both trials. Younger adults were also better able to encode the content than older adults which pronounces age deficits in text recall and reinforces some of the assumptions about older adults being less able to encode information. This is because age differences in recall performance were noticed when research participants were provided with different kinds of sentences. Evaluation: There are no problems with the study because the researchers covered pretty much every area which needed to be touched to prove the reality of the assumptions made in the paper prior to conducting experiments. They made a convincing case because the study helps readers to acquire a better understanding of age deficits in different contexts. Older and younger adults differ from each other on basis of task performance. Some tasks helped to make these age deficits more pronounced, while others revealed minimal deficits. Older adults were more rigid in their time allocation policy compared to younger adults who were more flexible. Older adults demonstrated a certain kind of insensitivity to goals which has to do with their inability to allocate resources properly in accordance with task demands. This difference is age-related and helps to learn more about reading and recall attitudes of older and younger adults. The experiments help to confirm that younger adults are better able than older adults at wise recruitment of resources in accordance with the nature of a task. Read More