Interactive effects of age and interface differences on search strategies and performance

Abstract

We present results from an experiment that studied the information search behavior of younger and older adults in a medical decision-making task. To study how different combination of tasks and interfaces influenced search strategies and decision-making outcomes, we varied information structures of two interfaces and presented different task descriptions to participants. We found that younger adults tended to use different search strategies in different combination of tasks and interfaces, and older adults tended to use the same top-down strategies across conditions. We concluded that older adults were able to perform mental transformation of medical terms more effectively than younger adults. Thus older adults did not require changing strategies to maintain the same level of performance.