The tool effect is lower in older adults with or without cognitive impairments than in young adults

Training effects of affordance judgments in four different settings: towards developing a training battery for affordance judgments

Training affordance judgments (AJs) across different settings, such as judging whether an object is within reach or an obstacle conquerable, could be meaningful to older adults and neurological patients with diminished judgment behaviors.The long-term aim is to develop a comprehensive training battery with different types of AJ tasks. The present study used a between-subjects design to evaluate trainability in four different settings. Judgment behavior of 52 healthy young adults was trained (80 trials) in one out of four settings (per trained task N = 13): 1. Reaching horizontally forward for an object, 2. Fitting one hand horizontally into an aperture, 3. Fitting upright under a horizontal barrier, and 4. Stepping over a hurdle. Participants' judgment performance was assessed pre- versus post-training. Additionally, to assess whether other AJ-based tasks as potential distractors may override training effects, the other three non-trained tasks were presented, and subsequently, judgment performance in the trained task was assessed once more. Accuracy, judgment tendency, and perceptual sensitivity served as dependent variables.A Friedman Test revealed a main effect of time point in all three variables. Post hoc analyses showed significant improvements in the trained task even after exposure to other AJ tasks.The results suggest that in young healthy adults, AJs can be trained effectively within different AJ settings, and improvements within one setting can last, even when AJs in other settings are solved in between. Our study provides proof of principle and an important step towards developing a training battery for AJs.

Older adults do not consistently overestimate their action opportunities across different settings

Am I still able to climb the ladder? Aging accompanies changes in physical constitution and a higher risk of injuries. At the same time, the judgment of action opportunities needs to be highly adaptive to the given task setting. We examined older adults' (n = 40) judgment tendencies in four different tasks by use of a detection theory approach. The tasks' setting differed in their boundaries' proximity to the actor with either proximal (e.g., judging one's hand fit into an opening) or distal boundaries (e.g., judging the reachability of a distant object). The older participants showed significantly more liberal judgments in tasks with distal boundaries. Body awareness and alertness were associated with the extent of judgment disparity between setting types. Subsequently, we compared a gender- and education-matched subsample of the group (n = 24) to a younger sample (n = 24). Older participants' judgment tendencies were significantly more extreme, with stronger under- or overestimations depending on the type of setting. We discuss potential links between more extreme judgments in older adults and higher reliance on learned patterns. Future research is needed to further unravel these setting-dependent behavioral differences and the factors contributing to more extreme judgment tendencies with growing age.