Effects of prior-task failure (i.e., decreased performance on a target task following failure on a prior task) were tested in young and older adults. Young and older participants (N=120) accomplished a computational estimation task (i.e., providing the best estimates to arithmetic problems) before and after accomplishing a dot comparison task in a control or in a failure condition. Both groups decreased their performance on the target computational estimation following failure on the prior dot comparison task. Also, prior-task failure led young and older adults to select the better strategy less often and to use the easier strategy more often. Our findings show, for the first time, impaired performance after experiencing failure in both young and older adults. We discuss implications of these findings for further our understanding of effects of task transitions (i.e., prior-task success and failure) on cognitive performance.

在年轻人和老年人中测试了先前任务失败的影响（即，在先前任务失败后在目标任务上的表现下降）。年轻和年长的参与者（N=120) 在控制或故障条件下完成点比较任务之前和之后完成了计算估计任务（即，提供对算术问题的最佳估计）。在先前的点比较任务失败后，两组都降低了他们在目标计算估计上的表现。此外，先前任务失败导致年轻人和老年人较少选择更好的策略，而更频繁地使用更简单的策略。我们的研究结果首次表明，年轻人和老年人在经历失败后的表现都会受到影响。我们讨论了这些发现的意义，以进一步了解任务转换（即，先前任务成功和失败）对认知表现的影响。