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AGE AND BEHAVIOR: REDUNDANT INFORMATION

Redundant information—as may be given in an instruction, for example—is also a source of difficulty in problem solving. Such information is not only irrelevant and uniformative, but it often is the source of misdirected behavior. Redundancy has been seen as a special difficulty for older problem solvers. Redundancy is seen in inquiry as well as in given information. To solve problems, it is usually necessary to acquire information from the task itself. Older adults, in attempts to gain this information, tend to make more inquiries than do younger ones, and they often make the same inquiry over and over again. It is as if the older adults have difficulty in giving meaning to the information gained from their inquiries and, once understood, have difficulty in remembering it. The frequency of redundant inquiry in later life is a most prominent feature in the poor performances of the elderly. For successful solution of many tasks, it is necessary to elict information piece by piece for later integration. Before this can be accomplished, explicit knowledge of the goal must be had; older people often do not have this knowledge until very late in the exploratory effort. Thus, their inquiries—their search for information—tend to be characterized by a lack of order with considerable fluctuation and haphazard questioning. Efforts to teach old people to search for information in orderly ways, and other efforts designed to teach effective strategies of problem solving have met with only very limited success. *302\220\8*