Higher relevance may increase older adults' engagement in cognitively demanding activities; however, whether this effect will maintain when available cognitive resources are limited? Consequently, we investigated the joint impact of task relevance and cognitive load on older and younger adults' decision search behaviors. We adopted a 2 (age: young/old) × 2 (cognitive load: without load/with load) × 2 (task relevance: high/low) mixed design. Sixty-one younger and 63 older adults completed high-relevance and low-relevance decisions. Our results revealed that older (vs. younger) adults took more time and more alternative-based search before decision-making. Both age groups sampled less information with an additional memory task. Additionally, they spent more time and effort to sample more information on high-relevance (vs. low-relevance) decisions; however, such differences disappeared when with an additional memory task. Task relevance promoted both age groups' search engagement, but this effect was subjected to their available cognitive resources.

中文翻译：

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任务相关性和认知负荷对成人决策信息搜索的影响。

更高的相关性可能会增加老年人对认知要求高的活动的参与；然而，当可用的认知资源有限时，这种效果是否会持续？因此，我们调查了任务相关性和认知负荷对老年人和年轻人决策搜索行为的联合影响。我们采用了 2（年龄：年轻/老年）×2（认知负荷：无负荷/有负荷）×2（任务相关性：高/低）混合设计。61 名年轻人和 63 名老年人完成了高相关性和低相关性的决定。我们的结果显示，老年人（与年轻人相比）在做出决策之前花费了更多时间和更多基于替代的搜索。两个年龄组都通过额外的记忆任务采样较少的信息。此外，他们花了更多的时间和精力来采样更多关于高相关性的信息（相比之下）。低相关性）决定；然而，当有额外的记忆任务时，这种差异就消失了。任务相关性促进了两个年龄组的搜索参与度，但这种影响受他们可用的认知资源的影响。