Conscious and Unconscious Decision-Making in Younger and Older Adults

The Unconscious Thought Theory (e.g. Dijksterhuis, 2004) supposes two modes of thought in decision making: unconscious and conscious. Conscious thinking requires attention whereas unconscious thinking does not. Because in older people cognitive resources are declined it was hypothesized that older people should show impaired performance in a conscious decision task whereas task performance that requires unconscious thinking should not be impaired. Surprisingly we found no differences at all between younger and older people in both task.