Age Differences in Day-To-Day Speed-Accuracy Tradeoffs: Results from the COGITO Study

ABSTRACT

We examined adult age differences in day-to-day adjustments in speed-accuracy tradeoffs (SAT) on a figural comparison task. Data came from the COGITO study, with over 100 younger and 100 older adults, assessed for over 100 days. Participants were given explicit feedback about their completion time and accuracy each day after task completion. We applied a multivariate vector auto-regressive model of order 1 to the daily mean reaction time (RT) and daily accuracy scores together, within each age group. We expected that participants adjusted their SAT if the two cross-regressive parameters from RT (or accuracy) on day t-1 of accuracy (or RT) on day t were sizable and negative. We found that: (a) the temporal dependencies of both accuracy and RT were quite strong in both age groups; (b) younger adults showed an effect of their accuracy on day t-1 on their RT on day t, a pattern that was in accordance with adjustments of their SAT; (c) older adults did not appear to adjust their SAT; (d) these effects were partly associated with reliable individual differences within each age group. We discuss possible explanations for older adults’ reluctance to recalibrate speed and accuracy on a day-to-day basis.

KEYWORDS:

• Reaction time
• multilevel vector autoregressive model
• speed-accuracy tradeoff
• COGITO

Article Information

Conflict of interest disclosures: Each author signed a form for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. No authors reported any financial or other conflicts of interest in relation to the work described.

Ethical principles: The authors affirm having followed professional ethical guidelines in preparing this work. These guidelines include obtaining informed consent from human participants, maintaining ethical treatment and respect for the rights of human or animal participants, and ensuring the privacy of participants and their data, such as ensuring that individual participants cannot be identified in reported results or from publicly available original or archival data.

Funding: This work was supported by the Grant M.FE.A.BILD0005 from the Max Planck Society, by the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award (to Martin Lövdén) of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation donated by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, by the Grant KFG163 from the German Research Foundation, and by the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Award of the German Research Foundation to Ulman Lindenberger.

Role of the funders/sponsors: None of the funders or sponsors of this research had any role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; or decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

Acknowledgments: The authors would like to thank the Associate Editor for the Special Issues Stephen G. West for his precious editorial assistance on prior versions of this manuscript. The ideas and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors alone, and endorsement by the authors’ institutions or the funding agencies is not intended and should not be inferred.

Notes

1 The mean over the 100 days of the daily mean RT of each participant and the mean accuracy score across the 100 days of the daily accuracy scores correlated r =.74 in the younger and r =.51 in the older adults. We interpret these between subject correlations as being dominated by individual differences in SAT, rather than by individual differences in ability (according to which we would expect that higher levels of ability would correlate positively with higher accuracy and negatively with RTs).

Additional information

Funding

German Research Foundation German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF; CAI) Max Planck Society (M.FE.A.BILD0005)