When and how did you go wrong? Characterizing mild functional difficulties in older adults during an everyday task

ABSTRACT

Mild functional difficulties associated with cognitive aging may be reliably measured by coding “micro-errors” during everyday tasks, like meal preparation. Micro-errors made by 25 older adult and 48 younger adults were coded on four dimensions to evaluate the influence of: 1) poor error monitoring; 2) goal decay; 3) competition for response selection when switching to a new subtask; and 4) interference from distractor objects. Micro-errors made by young adults under a dual task load also were analyzed to determine the influence of overall performance level. Older adults’ micro-errors were observed when switching to a new subtask and to unrelated distractors. Slowed error monitoring and goal decay also influenced micro-errors in older adults, but not significantly more so than younger adults under the dual task. Interventions to reduce interference from distractors and to increase attention at critical choice points during tasks may optimize everyday functioning and preclude decline in older adults.

KEYWORDS:

• Aging
• everyday function
• activities of daily living
• object use
• error monitoring
• cognitive interference

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest pertaining to the research reported in this manuscript.

Notes

1. In response to an anonymous Reviewer’s concern that differences in order in which task steps were performed across the groups might have influenced the results for the task segment analysis, we reviewed video-recordings of all participants and coded the order in which the 13 primary lunch task steps were completed. We found a striking similarity in the order of steps within and across the groups, with over 80% of participants in each group (i.e., younger adult, older adult, and young adult-dual task) performing the sandwich steps (i.e., take bread, add peanut butter) in the beginning segment, wrapping and packing the sandwich in the middle segment, and filling the thermos, packing the thermos, and closing the lunch box in the end segment. Across all groups, over 75% of participants performed 10 of the 13 major task steps in the same segment (i.e., beginning, middle, end). For example, when examining the order of the step, “put peanut butter on bread,” we observed that 92% of older adults, 85% of younger adults in the Standard Condition, and 86% of younger adults in the Dual Condition performed that step in the beginning segment. We used chi-square analyses to evaluate differences between the groups in the proportion of participants who performed each of the lunch task steps in the “beginning,” “middle,” or “end.” All comparisons were non-significant [χ² (1) <3.49, p >0.17 for all]. Thus, we concluded that the differences in beginning/end micro-errors between the groups could not be explained by differences in the order in which task steps were performed.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by the Diamond Research Scholars Program of Temple University and the National Institute on Aging Grant R21AG060422 to TG. A portion of the data was presented at the 2017 and 2018 North American meeting of the International Neuropsychological Society.