| Poster | Poster Session 04 Program Schedule
02/15/2024
12:00 pm - 01:15 pm
Room: Majestic Complex (Posters 61-120)
Poster Session 04: Neuroimaging | Neurostimulation/Neuromodulation | Teleneuropsychology/Technology
Final Abstract #94
Self-Efficacy for Cognitive Everyday Tasks and its Relation to a Technology-Based Health Navigation Task in Middle-Aged and Older Adults: A Pilot Study
Matteya Proctor, Washington State University, Pullman, United States
Carolyn Pagán, Washington State University, Pullman, United States
Samina Rahman, Washington State University, Pullman, United States
Victoria Kordovski, SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, United States
Steven Woods, University of Houston, Houston, United States
Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe, Washington State University, Pullman, United States
Category: Teleneuropsychology/ Technology
Keyword 1: aging (normal)
Keyword 2: technology
Keyword 3: assessment
Objective:
With the emergence of new technology, communication strategies are transitioning to internet-based delivery methods. Despite the potential that technology has to improve health management and literacy, older adults face more barriers to technology use than the younger population, partly due to cognitive beliefs including self-efficacy (SE), or one’s confidence in their ability. The present study examined the relationship between SE for cognitive everyday tasks and performance on a naturalistic internet-based health search task (HST). We hypothesized that SE for cognitive everyday tasks would be positively associated with total accuracy on the HST and negatively associated with HST completion time.
Participants and Methods:
Participants were 42 community-dwelling middle-aged and older adults (age: M = 68.12, SD = 7.34, range = 51 – 84 years; education: M = 16.52, SD = 3.44; 76.2% female; Telephone Interview of Cognitive Status (TICS): M = 36.38, SD = 1.71). Part IV of the Cognitive Self-Efficacy Questionnaire (Toglia & Johnston, 2017) was used to measure SE, with a higher score representing greater SE in the completion of cognitively demanding everyday tasks. Adapted from an eHealth Fact Search task (Kordovski et al., 2020), the HST measures one’s ability to navigate the internet to efficiently find and evaluate health information. Performance on the HST was quantified by task accuracy and completion time scores.
Results:
An examination of potential covariates (demographics, TICS) revealed no significant correlations with the HST outcome variables. Correlation analyses indicated that the relationship between SE and HST total accuracy was small and not statistically significant, r(40) = .13, p = .21. There was a small-to-medium negative correlation between SE and HST time, r(40) = -.25, p = .06, suggesting a trend for those with higher self-efficacy to finish the HST task quicker.
Conclusions:
As the internet is increasingly being used to gather health information, it is important to consider the psychological factors that may support mid-life and older adults’ navigation of online health-related sources. The findings suggest that the relationship between cognitive beliefs and applied internet skills may be more nuanced than general SE for cognitive everyday tasks. In addition, the small sample size limited the ability to examine more complex models, such as SE as a potential moderator of the relationship between cognition and health-related internet navigation. Future work might examine other variables, such as technology-specific measures of SE and electronic health literacy, and other models using a larger, more diverse sample. Understanding how cognitive beliefs related to technology and internet use might impact access to health information will have important implications in cognitive interventions and outreach health education in mid-life and older adult populations.
|
|---|
