Easing Everyday Decisions: Interdisciplinary development of interventions to support older adults' everyday decision-making

随着社会中老年人比例的增长，支持老年人保持幸福，健康和独立到老年变得越来越重要。能够自信地做出日常决定是独立生活的核心，也是许多日常生活活动的核心组成部分，例如管理预算，做出购买决定，安全管理药物，选择营养食品以及制定旅行和交通计划。糟糕的决策与财务脆弱性，易受欺诈，健康状况不佳以及最终失去独立性有关。我们的目标是为老年人提供所需的工具，帮助他们轻松地进行日常决策，帮助他们过上健康、满意和独立的生活。我们已经知道，在认知要求较高的任务上，老年人的决策不如年轻人准确，但也存在不太清楚的隐性成本，即决策可能更慢、更费力、效率更低。该项目将使用一系列研究方法来充分了解这些隐性成本。其目的是制定一项干预措施，a）简化老年人的决策过程，B）向老年人和组织提供令人信服的证据，说明参与决策支持的全部好处。我们将对决策支持方法进行跨学科评估，借鉴不同学科的方法，详细了解老年人在决策时面临的挑战，以及减轻这些决策的好处。第一，我们会谘询长者的意见，让他们有实际可行的措施，协助他们作出决定。我们将考虑使任务信息更容易查看的方法（例如，增加尺寸或去除干扰），以及减少在做出决定时必须记住的信息量的方法（例如，做笔记或划掉选项）。然后，我们将使用一系列研究方法评估决策支持的影响。我们将使用行为实验来评估决策的速度和准确性，“大声思考”访谈来确定老年人在决策时报告的认知步骤，错误和困难，以及功能性大脑成像和眼动追踪来评估决策中涉及的努力和神经处理量。跨学科评估的结果可以用来提供令人信服的指导老年人如何减轻他们的日常决策。在这个项目中，我们将把评估的结果转化为一个研讨会和指导手册，为老年人提供实用的支持，如何减轻他们的日常决策，在一个原则证明评估的指导的好处。老年人将在讲习班结束后立即提供反馈，并在一个月后提供有关他们在日常生活中实践指导的经验的信息。在未来，更大规模的评估可以评估老年人的长期，现实世界的好处，并扩大指导的范围，包括老年人的家庭和组织谁提供决策信息给老年人。

As the proportion of older adults in society grows, it becomes increasingly important to support older adults to remain happy, healthy, and independent far into old age. Being able to confidently make everyday decisions is at the heart of independent living, and is a core component of many activities of daily living, such as managing a budget, making purchasing decisions, safely managing medication, choosing nutritious food, and making travel and transportation plans. Poor decision-making is associated with financial vulnerability, susceptibility to scams, poor wellbeing, and ultimately, loss of independence. We aim to give older adults the tools they need to ease their everyday decision-making, helping them to live healthy, satisfying, and independent lives.We already know that older adults make less accurate decisions than young adults on cognitively-demanding tasks, but there are also hidden costs that are less well understood, where decision-making may be slower, more effortful, and less efficient. The project will use a range of research methods to fully understand these hidden costs. The aim is to develop an intervention that a) eases the decision-making process for older adults, and b) provides compelling evidence to older adults and organisations on the full range of benefits from engaging with decision-making support. We will conduct an interdisciplinary evaluation of the decision-making support methods, drawing on methods from different disciplines to gain a detailed understanding of the challenges that older adults face when making decisions, and the benefits of easing those decisions. First, we will consult older adults on practical measures to ease their decision making. We will consider methods that make task information easier to see (e.g., increasing size or removing distractions), and methods that reduce the amount of information that must be held in mind while making a decision (e.g., making notes or crossing out options). We will then evaluate the impact of the decision-making support using a range of research methods. We will use behavioural experiments to assess the speed and accuracy of decision-making, 'think-aloud' interviews to identify the cognitive steps, errors and difficulties that older adults report while making decisions, and functional brain imaging and eye tracking to assess the amount of effort and neural processing involved in making decisions. The results of the interdisciplinary evaluation can be used to provide compelling guidance to older adults on how to ease their everyday decisions. Within this project, we will translate the findings of the evaluation into a workshop and guidance booklet for older adults on how practical support can ease their everyday decision-making, in a proof-of-principle assessment of the benefits of the guidance. Older adults will provide feedback immediately following the workshop and one month later, to provide information on their experience of putting the guidance into practice in their everyday lives. In the future, larger-scale evaluations can assess the longer-term, real-world benefit to older adults, and widen the scope of the guidance to include families of older adults and organisations who provide decision-making information to older adults.