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AGE AND BEHAVIOR: PERSONALITY AND COGNITION IN CAUTIOUS BEHAVIOR - STRUCTURE AND DIRECTION

A clear situational structure and a clear direction minimize differences among age groups. Korchin and Basowitz (1956) presented young and elderly adults with a series of 13 pictures, the first of which was a cat that, by successive changes in the picture series, gradually became a dog. The greatest ambiguity of percept, i.e., dog or cat, was found in the middle pictures in the series. Frenkel-Brunswik (1949) first used such a picture series to investigate the now classic concept, "intolerance of ambiguity," as a "perceptual personality variable."
When Korchin and Basowitz presented their subjects with this dog-cat series, they found that the older adults tended to shift from cat to dog later in the series than did the young adults. Moreover, they tended to vacillate more from dog to cat in the successive pictures. The older people could be said to be cautious in modifying their percept to dog.
A subsequent study based upon this one was carried out, but with a variation of the procedure (Botwinick, 1962). The variation in procedure led to a variation of results, emphasizing the importance of specifying the conditions of measurement. The same dog-cat series was presented to young and old adults, and, in addition, a 22-picture series of a triangle merging into a circle was given. In this study, the shift was made earlier in the series by the older people than by the younger.
In the Korchin and Basowitz study it might be concluded that the older subjects were more cautious in making the change because the ambiguous situation was fraught with uncertainty. In the Botwinick study, uncertainty was minimal. When Frenkel-Brunswik showed the pictures she asked some form of, "What is it?" This made for uncertainty with cautiousness and perseveration. When Korchin and Basowitz showed the pictures they asked, "Is it more like a cat or more like a dog?" There was more structure here, but the emphasis was not on shifting and uncertainty remained. The older people vacillated back and forth and then made the final shift late in the series. In the Botwinick study there was maximum structure: The need to shift was clearly emphasized in the instructions; the beginning and end points of the series were shown at the start of the experiment. The subjects were not given an opportunity to vacillate back to initial percepts since the experiment was terminated with the first shift.
It is suggested here that, given appropriate structure and direction rather than an opportunity to determine structure and direction by oneself, the older person will perform with minimum difficulty. As problems become harder, as certainty diminishes, perhaps as self-confidence declines, as the need for change remains unspecified, the older person will fare less and less well.
Specifying directions to provide structure was seen also as helpful to the elderly in quite a different situation. As described in the previous chapter, Brinley (1965) tested old and young people in a series of mainly cognitive tasks. The tasks were given with three different instructions: (1) the subject had to discover for himself what was required (least structured); (2) the subject needed to keep in mind a sequence of instructions; and (3) called "Directions," the subject was told explicitly what the test required (most structured). The older people performed most adequately in the structured situation and least well in the unstructured one.
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