Objectives Using external feedback to adjust behavior relies on dopaminergic pathways that are sensitive to age-related change. Prior research using electrophysiological methods has yielded mixed findings regarding age differences in feedback processing. The current study was designed to test predictions of two influential theories-the dopamine hypothesis of aging and socioemotional selectivity theory-regarding the effects of age and feedback properties (valence and social content) on behavioral and electrophysiological markers of feedback processing.Methods Healthy community-dwelling adults (47 younger, 48 older) completed a time-estimation task with social and nonsocial feedback stimuli while EEG data were acquired. Key outcome measures included behavior as well as feedback-sensitive event-related potentials (ERPs): P2, feedback-related negativity (FRN), and P300.Results In both age groups, negative feedback elicited greater behavioral adjustments than positive feedback, and social feedback elicited higher overall performance than nonsocial feedback. Furthermore, all ERP components were sensitive to feedback valence and social content. Whereas both factors were more influential for older versus younger adults during early processing, valence was more influential for younger versus older adults during later processing.Discussion Using a well-powered design, this study shows that age differences in electrophysiological correlates of feedback processing exist even when younger and older adults show similar behavioral responses to feedback. Neither the dopamine theory of aging nor the socioemotional selectivity theory fully accounts for these complex findings, highlighting the need for theoretical refinement and demonstrating the utility of EEG methods in the cognitive neuroscience of aging.

The neurophysiological basis of vection (i.e., the illusion of self-motion) is not well understood. Preliminary evidence suggests that neural predictors of vection can be identified through event-related potentials (ERPs) and that these markers may correlate with vection intensity. The current study examined age-related differences in neurocortical activity during the early stages of sensory processing of vection-inducing stimuli. Twenty-two younger (age range: 20-35 years) and 25 older adults (age range: 65-83) observed optokinetic stimuli in two blocks, a short (∼3s) presentation block and a long (35s) presentation block. In both types of blocks, the optokinetic stimuli varied in motion coherence (coherent vs. non-coherent motion). During the short presentation block, EEG was used to measure neural activity in the form of ERPs time-locked to the onset of visual motion, whereas subjective ratings of vection intensity, duration, and onset latency were collected during the long presentation block. Vection was significantly stronger following coherent vs. non-coherent motion for both age groups. ERP analyses revealed differences between coherent and non-coherent motion at parietal-occipital electrodes around 100-150 ms (P1) and 150-230 ms (P2), with greater area under the curve (AUC) during non-coherent vs. coherent motion. Neither vection ratings nor ERPs showed significant age differences for coherent visual motion; however, age differences in ERPs were observed during the processing of non-coherent visual motion. These findings indicate that the subjective experience of vection and the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying visual processing preceding vection remain relatively stable with age. However, they also reveal age-related differences in the processing of non-coherent motion.

This article commemorates the 40th anniversary of the publication of Psychology and Aging, the premier journal for basic and applied psychological research on aging and adult lifespan development, published by the American Psychological Association. To this end, we summarize the journal's history based on the editorials of previous editors, and we highlight the continuity in the journal's mission (especially with regard to high standards for scientific rigor, as well as openness to new content, understudied populations, and innovative methods), its increasing impact, and the great diversity of topics addressed in the last four decades. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of videoconferencing platforms became ubiquitous in postsecondary education around the world, making it crucial to understand how to maximize the efficacy of synchronous online classes. Given that social information can act as a motivation and improve memory, the current study tested the hypothesis that brief social presence during an online class would act as a social reward that would increase delayed memory for lecture information. Undergraduate students attended a mock synchronous class during which they viewed a pre-recorded science lecture, and social presence was manipulated by having participants turn on their cameras before and after the lecture (high social presence) or having cameras remain off during the entire class (low social presence). After 24 hours, participants completed a surprise memory test for the lecture material and a subjective experience survey about the class. As predicted, participants in the high social presence condition demonstrated higher recognition memory for the lecture content and gave higher ratings of enjoyment and feeling part of a group compared to participants in the low social presence condition. These findings suggest that enhancing social presence in virtual environments may be leveraged to boost academic performance in university students.

Separate lines of evidence suggest that prosocial motives are increasingly prioritized with adult age, and that episodic memory remains sensitive to motivational influences throughout the adult lifespan. The current study was designed to examine the potential interplay of prosociality and episodic memory. By pairing a financial decision-making task with an incidental face recognition task, we examined the influence of prosocial decision-making on subsequent memory for associated information (i.e. faces) in healthy younger and older adults (N = 128). During the decision-making task, participants were presented with hypothetical financial transfers from their own account to a food bank charity, which was represented by the face of a food bank client. Prosocial reward was operationalized as the amount transferred to the charity per trial. During a subsequent surprise memory test, participants were asked to discriminate between faces seen during the decision-making task and new faces. Results revealed that older adults were more satisfied by, and more likely to accept, charitable transfers than younger adults, but there were no effects of prosocial reward on face recognition performance in either age group. These findings suggest that incidental encoding may not be sensitive to transient affective states associated with prosocial decisions in younger and older adults.

The present study examined age differences in the influence of informational value cues on curiosity and information seeking. In two experiments, younger and older adults (total N = 514) rated their curiosity about content before having the opportunity to seek out more information. Experiment 1 examined the impact of social value on curiosity and information seeking about trivia. Online popularity metrics served as social value cues. Metric visibility increased engagement with high-popularity information for older adults, whereas it decreased engagement with low-popularity information for younger adults. Experiment 2 examined the impact of practical value on curiosity and information seeking about science facts. Personal and collective practical value were highlighted by linking the information to the domains of medicine and the environment, respectively. Patterns of curiosity and information seeking revealed greater sensitivity to collective practical value in older than younger adults. In both experiments, the relationship between curiosity and information seeking was stronger in older adults than in younger adults. Overall, these findings suggest that age differences in motivational priorities may lead to age differences in curiosity and information seeking. In addition to highlighting strategies for fostering curiosity in older learners, these findings may also inform digital literacy interventions aimed at reducing engagement with clickbait and misinformation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

An important aspect to an immersive experience in Virtual Reality is vection, defined as the illusion of self-motion. Much of the literature to date has explored strategies to maximize vection through manipulations of the visual stimulus (e.g., increasing speed) or the experimental context (e.g., framing of the study instructions). However, the role of individual differences (e.g., age, biological sex) in vection susceptibility has received little attention. The objective of the current study was to investigate the influence of individual-difference factors on vection perception in younger and older adults. Forty-six younger adults ( M age = 25.1) and 39 older adults ( M age = 72.4) completed assessments of personality traits, field dependence, and visual attention prior to observing a moving visual stimulus aimed at inducing circular vection. Vection was measured using self-reports of onset latency, duration, and intensity. Results indicated that, in both age groups, females experienced longer-lasting vection compared to males. Additionally, the level of field dependence was related to vection intensity and duration in males but not in females. Variability in vection intensity was best explained by a mixture of biological, perceptual, cognitive, and personality variables. Taken together, these findings suggest that individual factors are important for understanding differences in vection susceptibility.

Recent studies of aging and decision making suggests that altruism increases with age. It is unclear, however, whether this pattern holds when choices are made under stress, as is often the case in real-world scenarios. The current study used an intertemporal choice task in which younger and older adults received a financial endowment before making a series of consequential intertemporal decisions involving gains, losses and charitable donations. Preceding the choice task, participants were exposed to a laboratory stressor. Physiological stress reactivity was a predictor of altruistic decision making in younger adults, such that individuals with higher stress reactivity made more generous choices. Older adults showed higher altruism than younger adults overall, with altruism unrelated to stress reactivity in older adults. These findings are consistent with an age-related change in the mechanisms underlying altruistic behavior.

The early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed large portions of the global populations to increased daily stressors. Research on risky choice in medical contexts suggests that affect-rich choice options promote less-advantageous decision strategies compared with affect-poor options, causing an "affect gap" in decision making. The current experiments (total N = 437, age range: 21-82) sought to test whether negative pandemic-related affect would lower expected-value (EV) maximisation within individuals. In Experiment 1, participants indicated how much they would be willing to pay to avoid specific pandemic experiences (e.g. "not being able to gather in groups"), and then chose among pairs of risky prospects that involved pandemic experiences or subjectively-equivalent monetary losses. EV maximising was lower for pandemic experiences than for equivalent monetary losses. Experiment 2 replicated this finding, and further demonstrated a moderating role of decision perspective. EV maximising was greater in decisions made for another person than in decisions made for oneself. These findings highlight potential strategies for boosting decision making under affect-rich real-world conditions.

Older adults tend to exhibit longer response times than younger adults in choice tasks across cognitive domains, such as perception, attention, and memory. The diffusion model has emerged as a standard model for analyzing age differences in choice behavior. Applications of the diffusion model to choice data from younger and older adults indicate that age-related slowing is driven by a more cautious response style and slower non-decisional processes, rather than by age differences in the rate of information accumulation. The Lévy flight model, a new evidence accumulation model that extends the diffusion model, was recently developed to account for differences in response times for correct and error responses. In the Lévy flight model, larger jumps in evidence accumulation can be accommodated compared to the diffusion model. It is currently unknown whether younger and older adults differ with respect to the jumpiness of evidence accumulation. In the current study, younger and older adults (N = 40 per age group) completed a letter-number-discrimination task. Results indicate that older adults show a more gradual (less "jumpy") pattern of evidence accumulation compared to younger adults. Implications for research on cognitive aging are discussed.

Social rejection is a common and unavoidable experience for users of dating apps. Research suggests that socially anxious individuals may be particularly likely to use dating apps to establish intimate relationships, given their preference for online (vs. face-to-face) communication. However, social anxiety (SA) symptoms are associated with heightened negative affect and decreased prosocial behavior following social rejection, suggesting that exposure to dating app rejection has deleterious consequences in this population. This study examined whether SA symptoms and social rejection (vs. acceptance) feedback interact to predict participants' negative and positive affect and social engagement with dating app matches. Participants (N = 128) evaluated for SA symptoms were randomly assigned to receive high or low match rate feedback on a simulated dating application task. SA symptoms were negatively associated with positive affect following high match rate feedback and positively associated with negative affect following low match rate feedback. SA symptoms were negatively associated with self-reported likelihood of contact initiation with matches. Results suggest that high socially anxious individuals are more susceptible to negative repercussions of social rejection on dating applications.

While researchers have linked adult age differences in hindsight bias to shifts in cognitive and motivational processes, the association between hindsight bias, emotion, and aging remains relatively underexplored. We examined emotion and hindsight bias in younger and older adults (N = 272) against the backdrop of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. Participants predicted electoral college votes for the two Presidential candidates before the election and were asked to remember their predictions approximately three weeks later, after the election results had been finalized. Republicans, for whom the electoral outcome was negatively tinged, exhibited greater hindsight bias for President Biden’s result compared with Democrats, for whom the electoral outcome was positive. The asymmetry in hindsight bias between Republicans and Democrats was similar for younger and older participants. This study suggests that negative emotions may exacerbate hindsight bias, and that adult age differences in hindsight bias observed in laboratory settings may not translate to real-world contexts.

Research on the illusion of self-motion (vection) has primarily focused on younger adults, with few studies including older adults. In light of documented age differences in bottom-up and top-down perception and attention, the current study examined the impact of stimulus properties (speed), cognitive factors (expectancy), and a combination of both (stimulus realism) on vection in younger (18-35 years) and older (65+ years) adults. Participants were led to believe through manipulation of the study instructions that they were either likely or unlikely to experience vection before they were exposed to a rotating visual stimulus aimed to induce circular vection. Realism was manipulated by disrupting the global consistency of the visual stimulus comprised of an intact 360 degrees panoramic photograph, resulting in two images (intact, scrambled). The speed of the stimulus was varied (faster, slower). Vection was measured using self-ratings of onset latency, duration, and intensity. Results showed that intact images produced more vection than scrambled images, especially at faster speeds. In contrast, expectation did not significantly impact vection. Overall, these patterns were similar across both age groups, although younger adults reported earlier vection onsets than older adults at faster speeds. These findings suggest that vection results from an interplay of stimulus-driven and cognitive factors in both younger and older adults.

Objectives The goal of this preregistered study was to synthesize empirical findings on age differences in motivated cognition using a meta-analytic approach, with a focus on the domains of cognitive control and episodic memory. Methods A systematic search of articles published before July 2022 yielded 27 studies of cognitive control (N = 1,908) and 73 studies of memory (N = 5,837). Studies had to include healthy younger and older adults, a within-subjects or between-subjects comparison of motivation (high vs low), and a measure of cognitive control or memory. The Age × Motivation effect size was meta-analyzed using random-effects models, and moderators were examined using meta-regressions and subgroup analyses. Results Overall, the Age × Motivation interaction was not significant in either cognitive domain, but the effect sizes in both domains were significantly heterogeneous, indicating a possible role of moderating factors in accounting for effect size differences. Moderator analyses revealed significant moderation by incentive type for episodic memory, but not for cognitive control. Older adults’ memory was more sensitive to socioemotional rewards, whereas younger adults’ memory was more sensitive to financial gains. Discussion Findings are discussed with reference to the dopamine hypothesis of cognitive aging and to life-span theories of motivational orientation. None of these theories is fully supported by the meta-analysis findings, highlighting the need for an integration of neurobiological, cognitive process, and life-span-motivational perspectives.

Abstract Reward-based motivation modulates attention and cognitive control across the life span, but little is known about age differences in the temporal dynamics of motivated attention. The current study examined the effects of financial incentives on visual attention using ERPs. Participants (26 younger, aged 18–33 years; 24 older, aged 65–95 years) completed an incentivized flanker task in which trial-level incentive cues signaled the availability of performance-contingent reward, and subsequent alerting cues signaled the onset of the flanker target. ERP components of interest included cue-related components (incentive-cue P2 and contingent negative variation, and alerting-cue N1) as well as target-related components (target N1 and P3). Transient effects of incentives were assessed by comparing ERP amplitudes across incentive and non-incentive trials from mixed-incentive blocks. Sustained effects of incentives were assessed by comparing ERP amplitudes across non-incentive trials from mixed-incentive blocks and non-incentive trials from pure non-incentive blocks. Younger adults showed transient effects of incentives on all components, whereas older adults showed these effects for incentive-cue P2 and alerting-cue N1 only. Both age groups showed sustained effects of incentives on cue-locked ERPs, but only younger adults showed sustained effects on target-locked ERPs. RT patterns mirrored the ERP findings, in that younger adults showed greater incentive-based modulation than older adults, but at a greater cost to accuracy. Overall, these findings reveal widespread age differences in the dynamics of incentive-motivated attention and cognitive control, particularly at longer timescales.

Visually induced motion sickness (VIMS) is a common phenomenon when using visual devices such as smartphones and virtual reality applications, with symptoms including nausea, fatigue, and headache. To date, the neuro-cognitive processes underlying VIMS are not fully understood. Previous studies using electroencephalography (EEG) delivered mixed findings, with some reporting an increase in delta and theta power, and others reporting increases in alpha and beta frequencies. The goal of the study was to gain further insight into EEG correlates for VIMS. Participants viewed a VIMS-inducing visual stimulus, composed of moving black-and-white vertical bars presented on an array of three adjacent monitors. The EEG was recorded during visual stimulation and VIMS ratings were recorded after each trial using the Fast Motion Sickness Scale. Time–frequency analyses were conducted comparing neural activity of participants reporting minimal VIMS ( n = 21) and mild–moderate VIMS ( n = 12). Results suggested a potential increase in delta power in the centro-parietal regions (CP2) and a decrease in alpha power in the central regions (Cz) for participants experiencing mild–moderate VIMS compared to those with minimal VIMS. Event-related spectral perturbations (ERSPs) suggested that group differences in EEG activity developed with increasing duration of a trial. These results support the hypothesis that the EEG might be sensitive to differences in information processing in VIMS and minimal VIMS contexts, and indicate that it may be possible to identify neurophysiological correlate of VIMS. Differences in EEG activity related to VIMS may reflect differential processing of conflicting visual and vestibular sensory information.

Older adults are more prone to false recognition than younger adults, particularly when new information is semantically related to old information. Curiosity, which guides information-seeking behavior and has beneficial effects on memory across the life span, may offer protection against false recognition, but this hypothesis has not been tested experimentally to date. The current study investigated the effect of curiosity on correct and false recognition in younger and older adults (total N = 102) using a trivia paradigm. On Day 1 of the study, participants encoded trivia questions and answers while rating their curiosity levels. On Day 2, participants completed a surprise old/new recognition test in which they saw the same trivia questions. Half of the questions were paired with old (correct) answers, and half were paired with new (incorrect) answers. New answers were either semantically related or unrelated to correct answers. For both age groups, curiosity at encoding was positively associated with correct recognition. For older adults, semantically related lures produced more false recognition than unrelated lures. However, this effect was mitigated by curiosity, such that older adults were less likely to endorse semantically related lures for high- versus low-curiosity questions. Overall, these results extend prior findings of curiosity-related memory benefits to the domain of recognition memory, and they provide novel evidence that curiosity may protect against false memory formation in older adults.

Reward-based motivation is associated with transient and sustained dopaminergic activity and with modulatory effects on attention and cognitive control. Age-related changes in the dopamine system are well documented, but little is known about age differences in the temporal dynamics of motivational influences on cognitive functions. The current study examined the effects of financial incentives on visual attention using event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants (26 younger, aged 18-33; 24 older, aged 65-95) completed an incentivized flanker task in which trial-level incentive cues signaled the availability of performance-contingent reward, and subsequent alerting cues signaled the onset of the flanker target. ERP components of interest included incentive-cue P2 and CNV, alerting-cue N1, target N1, and target P3. Transient effects of incentives were assessed by comparing ERP amplitudes across incentive and non-incentive trials from mixed-incentive blocks. Younger adults showed transient effects of incentives on all components, whereas older adults showed effects for incentive-cue P2 and alerting-cue N1 only. Sustained effects of incentives were assessed by comparing ERP amplitudes across non-incentive trials from mixed-incentive blocks and non-incentive trials from pure non-incentive blocks. Both age groups showed sustained effects of incentives on cue-locked ERPs, but only younger adults showed sustained effects on target-locked ERPs. Reaction-time patterns mirrored the ERP findings, in that younger adults showed greater incentive-based modulation than older adults. Overall, these findings suggest that both transient and sustained effects of incentives on visual attention are more fleeting for older than younger adults, consistent with widespread alterations in dopaminergic neuromodulation in aging.