Schedule of Events | Symposia

Motivated for memory: Young and older adults prioritize working memory in an effort trade-off task

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Dahlia Kassel¹ (dahliak@umich.edu), Cindy Lustig¹; ¹University of Michigan

Monetary incentives are often used motivate effort in monetary tasks, but in ‘the real world” the reward or punishment for good or poor performance often comes in the form of making future tasks easier or more difficult. Moreover, income differences between older and younger adults complicate the interpretation of age differences in the response to monetary incentives. We investigated how young and older adults responded to easy/hard work incentives for performance on a working memory task. Each set of working memory trials was followed by math verification problems. Each correct trial in the working memory task meant an easy trial in the math task; each incorrect trial meant a hard math problem. Incentivized participants were informed of these contingencies; control participants were not. We did not find significant effects of instruction (incentive vs control) for either age group. However, while data collection is ongoing, preliminary results indicate that older adults had significantly higher accuracy on the working memory task than the younger adults, and rated themselves as more motivated to perform well on it, despite rating it as being more demanding. Older adults also gave higher importance ratings to the working memory and easy math problems than young adults, whereas both age groups gave equally low importance ratings to the hard math trials. These results suggest that participants overall, and especially older adults, put more importance and motivation on the working memory task despite its difficulty.

Topic Area: EXECUTIVE PROCESSES: Working memory