Environmental Support and Design: An Information Processing Perspective

Abstract

Environmental Support has been loosely defined to mean those aspects of a task that reside outside the person. For instance, a recognition task is said to provide more environmental support than a recall task. Recall is usually inferior to recognition, and recognition tasks tend to minimize age differences in memory performance. However, there are memory tasks where having partial information presented at test (e.g., “part-set cueing”) makes people worse at recalling prior information than the simple “recall” cue. Similarly, presenting a display with task-irrelevant information will hurt the detection performance of older adults more than that of younger adults, probably because older adults inhibit the irrelevant information less successfully. We will present a framework for understanding task performance and environmental support that can be useful for deciding when presenting information in the environment will help or hinder task performance and review some evidence for that framework. Implications for designing age-appropriate technology will also be presented.