Cognitive Design

I get notes and calls regularly asking about doing cognitive design for older adults. So I am always on the look out for new scientific insights into how the elderly think and feel. Found a very interesting study on Why So Many Seniors Get Swindled that claims:

“… studies using brain imaging suggest that a subset of older adults who have no diagnosable neurological or psychiatric disease may experience disproportionate, age-related decline in specific neural systems crucial for complex decision-making. New functional neuroimaging findings, along with results from behavioral, psychophysiological and structural imaging studies of the brain, indicate that these seniors may be losing their ability to make complex choices that require effective emotional processing to analyze short-term and long-term considerations. Older adults in this category fall prey to the promise of an immediate reward or a simple solution to a complicated problem. They fail to detect the longer-range adverse consequences of their actions. Finally, they may assume long-term benefits in situations where there are none. We see these characteristics as direct consequences of neurological dysfunction in systems that are critical for bringing emotion-related signals to bear on decision-making. ”

In short, changes in their frontal lobe create a new type of age-related cognitive bias towards selecting simple solutions and immediate rewards reguardless of  longer-term consequences.   

This goes much deeper than the typical assumption that the elderly are more susceptible to fraud because of loneliness, guilt or some other cognitive need, or worse, that they have some form of dementia.