Effects of Age and Control Beliefs on Resource Allocation During Reading Abstract

Abstract

Past work suggests that a strong sense of control over one's cognitive ability is associated with higher levels of cognitive performance and that control beliefs may be even more important in later life, due to age-related declines in cognitive processes. However, less is known about the effects of control beliefs on encoding strategies, and whether these effects are comparable for younger and older adults. Participants were divided into high- (HC) and low- control (LC) beliefs groups based on their scores on the Personality in Intellectual-Aging Contexts Inventory. Participants then read relatively easy and difficult passages word-by-word on a computer for subsequent recall. The data suggest that among older, but not younger adults, control beliefs are particularly important when reading difficult passages. Findings as they relate to models of self-regulation and to implications for everyday functioning are discussed.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Margie Lachman for her comments on the manuscript and advice throughout the project and Rebecca Yun for her assistance in subject recruitment and data collection. We would also like to thank Liz Stine-Morrow and Carrie Andreoletti for their comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript. Funding for this research was provided by the National Institute on Aging, R03 AG17382 and R01 AG19196. A portion of this research was presented at the Eighth Biannual Cognitive Aging Conference, Atlanta, GA.

Notes

Flesch-Kincaid grade levels were obtained from Microsoft Word (2001) and are based on a formula that considers average number of words per sentence and average number of syllables per word.

One could argue that high- and low- control individuals’ reading rates are driving the results of the ANOVA on conceptual integration. If this were true, we would expect the effects of Age and Control Beliefs on time allocated to conceptual processing to be similar to those found on raw reading times. To test this, we repeated the analysis above using each participant's median word reading time (msec) for easy and difficult texts as dependent variables. The Age × Control Beliefs × Difficulty interaction was nonsignificant, F ≤ 1, and the means for younger adults (LC: M _E = 386, SD _E = 83; M _D = 408, SD _D = 52; HC: M _E = 340, SD_E = 44; M_D = 358, SD_D = 55) and older adults (LC: M_E = 546, SD_E = 182; M_D = 586, SD _D = 178; HC: M _E = 474, SD_E = 99; M_D = 514, SD_D = 102) do not parallel those presented in Figure 1.

The same pattern occurred when we excluded vocabulary and backward digit span measures, which had only marginally significant main effects of Control Beliefs.