The intention superiority effect and aging: similar magnitude of effects in an interference paradigm
Date
2018-11-07
Authors
Cohen, Anna-Lisa
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Abstract
Intentions have a special status in such important cognitive operations as prospective memory, or remembering to execute actions in the future. Indeed, recent research has shown that future-oriented information (such as intentions) have a higher and more sustained level of activation in mind than do other forms of to-be-remembered information. Such enhanced activation increases the accessibility of intentions for future retrieval operations, a phenomenon known as the “intention superiority effect.” Thus far, all research on the intention superiority effect has used facilitation paradigms, in which attending selectively to relevant stimuli facilitates performance on tasks that benefit from the processing of that information. The current investigation examines whether the intention superiority effect is also observed in an interference paradigm, in which sources of influence are in opposition. No previous research has demonstrated that the intention superiority effect is robust across such paradigm characteristics. Therefore, the first objective of the present study is to use a Stroop task to test the intention superiority effect within an interference paradigm.
Previous research on the intention superiority effect has been conducted largely with undergraduate university students. Little is known about whether this effect exists for cognitively vulnerable populations, such as older adults. Arguably, the absence of an intention superiority effect could account for lower performance in such related cognitive tasks as prospective memory. Therefore, the second objective of this research was to examine whether the intention superiority effect, as produced by an interference paradigm, exists also for older adults.
In a series of four experiments, participants received a brief Stroop word list including critical words from a previously encoded intention. We predicted that there would be more interference with colour naming for words that belonged to an intention that participants intended to carry out versus an intention that they did not have to carry out (i.e., intention superiority effect). Results of the four experiments for both young and older adults revealed longer latencies for words belonging to an intention that they intended to carry out. These data are the first demonstration of an intention superiority effect in an interference paradigm as well as the first demonstration of this effect in an older adult age group.
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Keywords
Aging, Cognition in old age, Memory