The Impact of Age on User Performance: A Field Experiment

ABSTRACT

This study investigates whether there are performance and self-efficacy differences between users based on their age when performing complex information technology tasks. This experimental study seeks to validate some research from cognitive science, which indicates that individuals exhibit a significant decrease in cognitive function in their late 20s and early 30s. A field experiment was created to compare how business professionals perform a series of related BI tasks of varying difficulty on laptops and tablet computers while working at their company sites. Results showed that subjects under 30 had statistically significant higher accuracy as measured by total correct, spent significantly less time in completing all tasks and had significantly higher levels of self-efficacy as measured by confidence. This is the first study to investigate whether there is an age performance gap in completing complex IT tasks on different computing devices using a controlled experiment with actual workers as the subjects.

KEYWORDS:

• Age and IT performance
• experiment
• user performance
• cognitive function and age

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).