How do older adults recognize illness under conditions of uncertainty? With support from the National Science Foundation, Drs. Finucane, Gullion, and Hillier aim to stimulate new knowledge about how the accuracy of disease risk recognition is impacted by basic cognitive processes that change with age and with learning opportunities in a probabilistic environment. Specifically, the research will test whether older adults (65-80 years), when compared with younger adults (21-40 years), have more difficulty in identifying and using multiple symptoms to recognize Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM). Behavioral measures of disease risk recognition processes will be developed, focusing on comprehension accuracy, consistency in judgment, and insight into the relevance of T2DM symptoms. The proposed work will examine how older versus younger adults learn and change their risk evaluations under the impetus of external stimuli (e.g., cues that are inversely vs. directly related to disease status).
The results will add to the fundamental knowledge base of several interdisciplinary fields, including decision science, gerontology, and public health, by advancing models of the dynamics of aging and risk judgment. The development of a performance-based tool for measuring basic judgment processes will enhance the capabilities of researchers to examine variations in the mental processes underlying disease risk evaluations over time and across contexts in a way that is sensitive to the interaction of decision maker and task characteristics. The major products of the proposed work will include at least one paper reporting the experimental results, one paper providing guidelines to service providers on ways to best support older adults in recognizing risk appropriately and to adapt to changing circumstances, and one paper on ways to reliably assess age-related changes in performance on probabilistic learning environments that speaks to gerontologists, endocrinologists, and other medical specialists. Participants in the proposed research will reflect the ethnic distribution in the Hawai'i population, thus making an important first step towards research on the judgment processes of high-risk ethnic groups. Importantly, by delineating exactly how older and younger adults' judgment processes differ, real-world risk communication / management policies can be tailored to older adults' strengths and weaknesses, decreasing the burden of disease for older adults, their families, and service providers.
