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To Go or to Stay: Age Differences in Cognitive Foraging

2011; Wiley; Volume: 33; Issue: 33 Linguagem: Inglês

1551-6709

Jessie Chin, Wai‐Tat Fu, Elizabeth A. L. Stine‐Morrow,

Child and Animal Learning Development

To Go or to Stay: Age Differences in Cognitive Foraging Jessie Chin University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Wai-Tat Fu University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Elizabeth Stine-Morrow University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Abstract: Cognitive foraging used the metaphor of animal foraging over patches of food to study how people allocate time to multiple resources for obtaining information. We used the word search puzzle paradigm to examine age differences in cognitive foraging behavior, especially when younger and older adults switch between patches (i.e., word puzzles). Results showed that older adults were able to adjust their departure time and switch frequencies depending on patch densities and switch time costs, and found as many words as younger adults in the puzzles despite their age-related change in processing capacities. Although older adults needed more time to find a new word in the puzzle, they adaptively persisted longer and switched fewer times between puzzles than younger adults to improve their performance. The connections between age differences in information uptake rates and the time to switch to different patches were also discussed.