DRU: The Dynamics of Aging and Disease Risk Recognition

老年人如何在不确定的情况下识别疾病？在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，Finucane、Gullion和Hillier博士的目标是激发关于疾病风险识别的准确性如何受到基本认知过程影响的新知识，这些认知过程随着年龄的增长和概率环境中的学习机会而变化。具体而言，该研究将测试老年人（65-80岁）与年轻人（21-40岁）相比，是否更难识别和使用多种症状来识别2型糖尿病（T2 DM）。将开发疾病风险识别过程的行为测量，重点是理解准确性、判断一致性和对T2 DM症状相关性的洞察。拟议的工作将研究老年人与年轻人如何在外部刺激的推动下学习和改变他们的风险评估（例如，与疾病状态成反比或直接相关的线索）。研究结果将通过推进老龄化和风险判断的动态模型，增加几个跨学科领域的基础知识，包括决策科学，老年学和公共卫生。发展一个基于表现的工具来衡量基本的判断过程，将提高研究人员的能力，以检查变化的心理过程的基础疾病风险评估随着时间的推移和跨上下文的方式是敏感的决策者和任务特征的相互作用。拟议工作的主要产品将包括至少一篇报告实验结果的论文，一篇为服务提供者提供指导方针的论文，介绍如何最好地支持老年人正确识别风险并适应不断变化的环境，以及一篇关于如何可靠地评估与年龄相关的性能变化的论文概率学习环境，与老年病学家，内分泌学家和其他医学专家交谈。拟议研究的参与者将反映夏威夷人口的种族分布，从而为研究高风险种族群体的判断过程迈出重要的第一步。重要的是，通过准确描述老年人和年轻人的判断过程有何不同，现实世界的风险沟通/管理政策可以根据老年人的优势和劣势进行量身定制，从而减轻老年人、其家人和服务提供者的疾病负担。

How do older adults recognize illness under conditions of uncertainty? With support from the National Science Foundation, Drs. Finucane, Gullion, and Hillier aim to stimulate new knowledge about how the accuracy of disease risk recognition is impacted by basic cognitive processes that change with age and with learning opportunities in a probabilistic environment. Specifically, the research will test whether older adults (65-80 years), when compared with younger adults (21-40 years), have more difficulty in identifying and using multiple symptoms to recognize Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM). Behavioral measures of disease risk recognition processes will be developed, focusing on comprehension accuracy, consistency in judgment, and insight into the relevance of T2DM symptoms. The proposed work will examine how older versus younger adults learn and change their risk evaluations under the impetus of external stimuli (e.g., cues that are inversely vs. directly related to disease status). The results will add to the fundamental knowledge base of several interdisciplinary fields, including decision science, gerontology, and public health, by advancing models of the dynamics of aging and risk judgment. The development of a performance-based tool for measuring basic judgment processes will enhance the capabilities of researchers to examine variations in the mental processes underlying disease risk evaluations over time and across contexts in a way that is sensitive to the interaction of decision maker and task characteristics. The major products of the proposed work will include at least one paper reporting the experimental results, one paper providing guidelines to service providers on ways to best support older adults in recognizing risk appropriately and to adapt to changing circumstances, and one paper on ways to reliably assess age-related changes in performance on probabilistic learning environments that speaks to gerontologists, endocrinologists, and other medical specialists. Participants in the proposed research will reflect the ethnic distribution in the Hawai'i population, thus making an important first step towards research on the judgment processes of high-risk ethnic groups. Importantly, by delineating exactly how older and younger adults' judgment processes differ, real-world risk communication / management policies can be tailored to older adults' strengths and weaknesses, decreasing the burden of disease for older adults, their families, and service providers.