Studies of life span development in everyday problem solving suggest two trajectories of change in adulthood: individuals become less effective at solving well-defined instrumental problems but more effective at managing ill-defined interpersonal problems. Two experiments were conducted to examine the ability of young and older adults to effectively manage an interpersonal problem that has a well-defined measure of instrumental success. Participants played an iterated Prisoner s Dilemma game with same-age, computer-simulated strangers (Experiment 1) and friends (Experiment 2). Success was dependent upon one s ability to put aside self-interest and cooperate with a partner. Computer-simulated partners reciprocated the participants decisions 100% of the time or behaved in a more self-interested manner. Young and older adults tendencies to create conflict with the reciprocating partner and their defensive reactions to the selfish partner were examined. Although young adults outperformed older adults when playing the game on their own, they did not carry this performance advantage into the interactive rounds. In fact, despite their success when playing alone, young adults were no more successful than older adults when interacting with others. Young and older adults both cooperated more with friends than with strangers and more with the reciprocating partner than the selfish partner. However, when the participants first interaction was with a selfish stranger, older adults were more cooperative than young adults and consequently accrued more reward. This is consistent with previous research demonstrating that older adults use more passive interpersonal problem solving strategies than young adults, and it also partially supports the prediction that advancing age leads to more effective strategy implementation when solving interpersonal problems.

Self-paced study involves choosing items for (re)study and determining how much time will be allocated to those items so as to maximize later recall, making it a viable venue for examining whether there are age-related differences in metacognitive control. Two prominent models have been proposed to account for item selection and study time allocation behaviors during self-paced study. The Discrepancy Reduction Model (DRM; Dunlosky & Hertzog, 1998; Nelson & Leonesio, 1988) suggests individuals will always select and allocate the most time to items that have not yet been learned, whereas the Region of Proximal Learning model (RPL; Metcalfe, 2002) predicts individuals will select the easiest unknown items and will only later select and allocate time to the more difficult items if time constraints permit, thus making distinctions among unlearned items graded by difficulty. Two experiments were conducted to examine whether younger and older adults item selection and study time allocation behaviors would be more consistent with DRM or RPL model predictions. Across both experiments younger and older adults initially selected easier items for study, providing the first evidence to date that the RPL model would extend to older adults self-paced study of heterogeneously difficult Spanish-English vocabulary pairs. However, both younger and older adults allocated more time to difficult than easier items. The assignment of point values to items in Experiment 2 affected how likely participants were to pursue each of four experimenter-determined task goals that either stressed the number of words recalled, points earned, or both. Whether point values initially favored recall of easy or difficult items interacted with time constraints to influence the basis (objective versus subjective difficulty) and order of participants item selections (Experiment 2). However, younger adults were better able to effectively allocate their study time to achieve self-determined (Experiment 1) and experimenter-determined goals (Experiment 2), indicating age-related differences in metacognitive control despite younger and older adults having similar memory self-efficacy ratings and encoding strategy use behaviors.

Technological advances will allow virtual agents to increasingly help individuals with daily activities. As such, virtual agents will interact with users of various ages and experience levels. Facial expressions are often used to facilitate social interaction between agents and humans. However, older and younger adults do not label human or virtual agent facial expressions in the same way, with older adults commonly mislabeling certain expressions. The dynamic formation of facial expression, or motion, may provide additional facial information potentially making emotions less ambiguous. This study examined how motion affects younger and older adults in recognizing various intensities of emotion displayed by a virtual agent. Contrary to the dynamic advantage found in emotion recognition for human faces, older adults had higher emotion recognition for static virtual agent faces than dynamic ones. Motion condition did not influence younger adults' emotion recognition. Younger adults had higher emotion recognition than older adults for the emotions of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness. Low intensities of expression had lower emotion recognition than medium to high expression intensities.