The effects of aging and deliberative activities on decision making were examined. In two separate tasks, young, middle-aged, and older adults were presented with four alternatives and given instructions to choose the best one. Following study, participants were either given additional time to think about their decision or were prevented from doing so. Decision quality did not benefit from additional deliberative activity when the structure of the stimuli facilitated fluent online processing. In contrast, deliberation promoted performance when such processing was more difficult. In addition, those individuals who focused on attribute information relevant to the decision context performed better than those who did not. Age differences in performance were minimal, but older adults with lower levels of education or cognitive ability tended to perform worse than the rest of the sample under conditions where deliberative skills were required to promote performance. The results are inconsistent with recent proposals regarding the benefits of passive deliberation. In addition, the results support the general assertion that the age effects in decision making will be most evident in situations dependent upon deliberative skills.

中文翻译：

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深思熟虑或不深思熟虑：年龄、任务特征和决策认知活动之间的相互作用

研究了老龄化和审议活动对决策的影响。在两个独立的任务中，年轻人、中年人和老年人被提供了四种备选方案，并给出了选择最佳方案的指示。在研究之后，参与者要么被给予额外的时间来考虑他们的决定，要么被阻止这样做。当刺激的结构促进流畅的在线处理时，决策质量并没有从额外的审议活动中受益。相比之下，当这种处理更困难时，深思熟虑会提高性能。此外，那些关注与决策上下文相关的属性信息的人比不关注的人表现更好。表现的年龄差异很小，但在需要审议技能来提高表现的条件下，受教育水平或认知能力较低的老年人往往比样本中的其他人表现更差。结果与最近关于被动审议的好处的建议不一致。此外，结果支持一般断言，即决策中的年龄效应在依赖于审议技能的情况下最为明显。