The effects of age and collaboration within elderly people on identifying the causes of unexpected events

Abstract

When a system yields an unpredicted output, people usually seek to identify the causes of the unexpected event. In this study, we investigate the effects of age and collaboration within elderly people on identifying the causes of unexpected events using the Three-card Monte card trick. The results of the experiments showed that performance for cause identification was lower in elderly participants compared to younger participants. Although there were no substantial differences in the reasoning strategies employed by younger and elderly participants, elderly participants experienced difficulties in distinguishing between trick-dependent and nondependent aspects. Collaboration between elderly participants facilitated cause-identification performance. However, while pairs of elderly participants were more suspicious of events involving tricks, they also remained suspicious of events that did not involve tricks.