ReviewPsychonomic bulletin & review2021
The ironic effect of older adults' increased task motivation: Implications for neurocognitive aging.
Review in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 42 citations in OpenAlex.
- Age-related changes in proprioception are of limited size, outcome-dependent and task-dependent.GeroScience · 2026Article
- Are the correlates of mind wandering consistent across younger and older adults?Psychological research · 2026Article
- The Longitudinal Impact of Psychosocial Factors on Cognition and Hearing in Younger and Older Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2026Article
- Strategy and Motivation, Rather Than Fatigue, Drive Age-Related Differences in Sustained Attention Performance: Evidence for Decoupled Beta-Band Oscillations.The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Article
- Student intrinsic motivational states underlie cognitive performance regardless of academic stage.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Age-related differences in the relationship between sustained attention and associative memory and Memory-Guided inference.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Memory selectivity in younger and older adults: The role of conative factors in value-directed remembering.Psychology and aging · 2025Article
- Counterfactual curiosity in real decisions: The roles of outcome valence and aging.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- How list composition affects the emotional enhancement of memory in younger and older adults.Cognition & emotion · 2025Article
- Review
- Mind-wandering when studying valuable information: The roles of age, dispositional traits, and contextual factors.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2025Article
- Age differences in motivation drive performance during the sustained attention to response task.PloS one · 2025Article
- Correcting fake news headlines after repeated exposure: memory and belief accuracy in younger and older adults.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2024Article
- Memory selectivity in older age.Current opinion in psychology · 2024Review
- Probing sustained attention and fatigue across the lifespan.PloS one · 2024Article
- Training in new forms of human-AI interaction improves complex working memory and switching skills of language professionals.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2023Article
- Autobiographical event memory and aging: older adults get the gist.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2022Review
- Motivation to Engage in Aging Research: Are There Typologies and Predictors?The Gerontologist · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Recent work suggests that most older adults who volunteer to take part in cognitive experiments are more motivated to do well than are undergraduate students. This empirical evidence is echoed by the impressions of cognitive aging researchers. We surveyed a large group (N = 88) of researchers asking about their perceptions of younger and older adults' motivation to take part in lab-based research. Not only were older adults seen as more motivated than younger adults, but researchers thought that the two groups participate for different reasons: younger adults to obtain course credit or monetary compensation, older adults to get a sense of their cognitive health, to further science, and out of curiosity. However, older adults' greater motivation to do well on cognitive tasks may leave them vulnerable to stereotype threat, the phenomenon by which individuals underperform when they are put in a position to either confirm or deny a negative stereotype about their group. In this opinion piece, we argue that most cognitive experiments, not just those designed to measure stereotype threat, likely induce some form of performance-related anxiety in older adults. This anxiety likely leads to greater task-related interference, or thoughts about how one is doing on the task, resulting in poorer performance. We discuss some of the potential implications for our understanding of neurocognitive aging.
Indexed as
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.