The proposed research is in response to PAR-03-056 and addresses area 15, """"""""Cognition in Context."""""""" It explores the impact of contextual factors on adults' beliefs in their capabilities for performance, or self-efficacy beliefs (Bandura, 1997), as well as relations among social context, self-efficacy beliefs, and actual performance on cognitive tasks. The cognitive tasks we propose to study are everyday problem solving items, that is, problems that are ecologically representative of challenges that occur in the natural social contexts of people's day-to-day lives. We draw on previous findings (Artistico, Cervone, & Pezzuti, 2003) indicating that older adults are capable of outperforming younger adults when everyday problems represent domains of high ecological relevance to the older-adult population. The proposed research builds on these past findings while specifically aiming to overcome two gaps in the extant literature. 1) Prior research comparing the performance of younger and older adults in different problem-solving contexts has confounded two independent factors: the context in which an everyday problem is faced and the content of the challenge being faced; this confound makes statements about context, per se, equivocal. We overcome this limitation by proposing experimental stimuli in which the content of a fixed everyday problem is described within varying social contexts that ecologically represent life experiences of younger, middle-age, and older adults. 2) Prior research has been group-centered, with older adults' performance being evaluated on a fixed set of problems that is generically relevant to their age group. This strategy is limited in that it may underestimate the maximal capacities of the idiosyncratic older adult who possesses unique domains of expertise that are not represented in generic item sets. We overcome this limitation through novel idiographic procedures that combine a diary study with laboratory assessments of problem solving. Participants in a single proposed study will attempt both nomothetic (relevant to a given age group) and idiographic (potentially idiosyncratic) problems. This design enables us to test the hypotheses that a) on nomothetic problem sets, there will be an interaction between participant age group and problem type, with older adults attaining their highest level of performance on problems of ecological relevance to their age group, and b) older adults will attain even higher levels of performance on idiographically-identified problems. This study would lay the foundation for a subsequent program of research that would have the aim of enhancing older adults' capacity to cope with everyday problems of living. This could be accomplished by combining the knowledge gained in the present proposed study with self-efficacy theory principles for enhancing beliefs in personal capabilities, including the provision of mastery experiences that may boost self-efficacy perceptions across multiple domains of functioning.
| Artistico, Daniele; Orom, Heather; Cervone, Daniel et al. (2010) Everyday challenges in context: the influence of contextual factors on everyday problem solving among young, middle-aged, and older adults. Exp Aging Res 36:230-47 |
