TY - JOUR
T1 - Adult age differences in covariation of motivation and working memory performance
T2 - Contrasting between-person and within-person findings
AU - Brose, Annette
AU - Schmiedek, Florian
AU - Lövdén, Martin
AU - Molenaar, Peter C.M.
AU - Lindenberger, Ulman
N1 - Funding Information:
The COGITO Study was supported by the Max Planck Society, including a grant from the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award (to Martin Lövdén) of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation donated by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF); the innovation fund of the Max Planck Society (M. FE. A. BILD 0005); the German Research Foundation (DFG; KFG 163); and the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF; CAI). The authors want to thank the following persons for their important roles in conducting the COGITO study: Colin Bauer, Christian Chicherio, Gabi Faust, Katja Müller-Helle, Birgit Heim, Annette Rentz-Lühning, Werner Scholtysik, Oliver Wilhelm, Julia Wolff, and a team of highly committed student research assistants.
PY - 2010/1
Y1 - 2010/1
N2 - Developmental theorists have proposed for a long time that the prevailing focus on stable individual differences has obstructed the discovery of short-term covariations between cognitive performance and contextual influences within individuals that may help to uncover mechanisms underlying long-term change. As an initial step to overcome this imbalance, we observed measures of motivation and working memory (WM) in 101 younger and 103 older adults across 100 occasions. Our main goals were to (1) investigate day-to-day relations between motivation and WM, (2) show that these relations differ between groups of younger and older adults, and (3) test whether the within-person and between-person structures linking motivational variables to WM are equivalent (i.e., the ergodicity assumption). The covariation between motivation and WM was generally positive in younger adults. In contrast, older adults showed reduced variability in motivation, increased variability across trials, and small reliability-adjusted correlations between motivation and WM. Within-person structures differed reliably across individuals, defying the ergodicity assumption. We discuss the implications of our findings for developmental theory and design, stressing the need to explore the effects of between-person differences in short-term covariations on long-term developmental change.
AB - Developmental theorists have proposed for a long time that the prevailing focus on stable individual differences has obstructed the discovery of short-term covariations between cognitive performance and contextual influences within individuals that may help to uncover mechanisms underlying long-term change. As an initial step to overcome this imbalance, we observed measures of motivation and working memory (WM) in 101 younger and 103 older adults across 100 occasions. Our main goals were to (1) investigate day-to-day relations between motivation and WM, (2) show that these relations differ between groups of younger and older adults, and (3) test whether the within-person and between-person structures linking motivational variables to WM are equivalent (i.e., the ergodicity assumption). The covariation between motivation and WM was generally positive in younger adults. In contrast, older adults showed reduced variability in motivation, increased variability across trials, and small reliability-adjusted correlations between motivation and WM. Within-person structures differed reliably across individuals, defying the ergodicity assumption. We discuss the implications of our findings for developmental theory and design, stressing the need to explore the effects of between-person differences in short-term covariations on long-term developmental change.
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U2 - 10.1080/15427600903578177
DO - 10.1080/15427600903578177
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:79953132790
SN - 1542-7609
VL - 7
SP - 61
EP - 78
JO - Research in Human Development
JF - Research in Human Development
IS - 1
ER -