DOES DIVIDING ATTENTION BECOME HARDER WITH AGE - FINDINGS FROM THE DIVIDED ATTENTION QUESTIONNAIRE

We developed a self-assessment scale, the Divided Attention Questionna ire (DAQ), to investigate whether adults report that dividing attentio n between two activities becomes more difficult with increasing age, a s would be predicted by a model of age-related reductions in inhibitio n (Hasher and Zacks, 1988). The DAQ difficulty rating scale produced s atisfactory estimates of internal consistency and test-retest stabilit y. Older adults, relative to young adults, rated most combinations of activities as more difficult, and also reported that most combinations had become more difficult over time. However, self-perceptions of abi lity in old age varied with task domain, such that activities that inv olved monitoring of novel information became increasingly difficult wi th advanced age, while routine activities and those involving speech p rocessing showed little change across the older groups studied. We sug gest that beliefs about self-efficacy under conditions of divided atte ntion can have important consequences for the behavior of the elderly.