Dissertation
Examining the Impact of Formal Planning on Performance in Older Adults using a Naturalistic Task Paradigm
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
01/2014
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/5425
Abstract
Planning ability, important for identifying and planning the steps to carry out complex problems, has been shown to decline with normal aging. However, age-related difficulties in planning abilities remain unclear. In this study, 32 younger adults and 64 older adults completed the Amap Task, a measure designed to separate and evaluate the formulation and execution stages of planning. Participants were tasked with reading a map layout of a university apartment and planning an efficient strategy to complete several tasks. To identify whether on-line execution abilities are augmented by formulating a plan, we introduced a formal planning and an informal planning condition. During the initial formulation stage, participants in the formal planning condition were instructed to write out a plan, whereas participants in the informal condition were instructed to simply initiate the task whenever they were ready, without the opportunity to write out a plan. To directly compare the effect of preplanning on execution abilities, none of the participants had access to their plan during the execution phase. For the formal planning condition, results revealed older adults were generally less accurate and less efficient than younger adults during the formulation stage, while there were no group differences in total formulation time for the informal planning condition. Across conditions, older adults obtained poorer execution accuracy and efficiency scores, took significantly longer to carry out the tasks, were more likely to omit task parts, and tended to engage in searching behavior more often in comparison to the younger adults. Both groups were shown to improve from formulation to execution, regardless of formulation performance. Results from our experimental manipulation revealed formal planning led to significant improvement in execution efficiency but not execution accuracy, suggesting that execution efficiency may build upon adequate plan formulation prior to task completion while accuracy may be less dependent on overt planning.
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Details
- Title
- Examining the Impact of Formal Planning on Performance in Older Adults using a Naturalistic Task Paradigm
- Creators
- Chad Joseph Sanders
- Contributors
- Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe (Advisor)Lauren Warren-Faricy (Committee Member)Bruce Wright (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Psychology, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 46
- Identifiers
- 99900581841801842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation