Do older adults have more difficulties in overcoming habitual behaviour?

Details

Supervisors

Hardwick, Robert M.

Faculty

Faculté des sciences de la motricité

Degree label

Master [60] en kinésithérapie et réadaptation

Abstract

For many of us, a habit is the usual way of acting or behaving acquired through frequent practice. Taking this subject further, we suggest that a habit is the process by which a stimulus triggers the preparation of a habitual response without necessarily initiating it. When the response time allows it, a habitual response may be prepared, but not initiated, allowing the possibility for it to be later replaced by a goal-directed response before an action is initiated. In an experiment, analysing habit computations, younger subjects (18-30) and older subjects (60+) were trained on an association task over 4 days, before the association was remapped. Older adults tended to be slower to learn an association task and to react to stimuli than younger adults. We suggest that age-related physiological changes in the brain could be responsible for these observations. Furthermore, the results showed that the younger adults developed habitual behaviour after 4 days of training, whereas the older adults apparently did not. We suggest that either older adults are not able to develop habitual behaviour through associative learning or that older adults require more extensive training, i.e., more days and/or more trials to establish behaviour.