- Title
- The perceived mental effort of everyday activities in older adults
- Creator
- Olds, Timothy S.; Dumuid, Dorothea; Mellow, Maddison L.; Keage, Hannah A. D.; Wade, Alexandra T.; Hunter, Montana; Karayanidis, Frini; Smith, Ashleigh E.
- Relation
- Experimental Gerontology Vol. 169, no. 111971
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.exger.2022.111971
- Publisher
- Elsevier Inc.
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2022
- Description
- People's perceptions of the mental effort required for everyday activities may drive variation in the relationships between lifestyles and cognitive ability. We asked n = 259 healthy older adults aged 60 to 70 years (90 males, 169 females) to provide a rating of the Perceived Mental Effort (PME) for each activity instance they recalled over a 48-h period as part of a time-use recall. PME was rated on a 9-point scale from “very, very low” (score of 1) to “very, very high” (score of 9). Across the entire sample, participants rated a total of 196 different activities and 17,433 activity instances. The mean PME for individual activities was 3.50 ± 1.58. PMEs varied significantly by activity domain, with highest ratings being for Work (5.48 ± 1.72) and the lowest for Self-Care (2.89 ± 0.98). In multivariate analyses, PME ratings were higher in males than females (+0.30), PMEs were higher later in the day, increased with task duration, and decreased with age (all p < 0.0001). Time-weighted average individual PMEs across the two days of recall ranged from 1.86 to 6.50, and were 0.3 units higher for males, but unrelated to age. Repeated intra-individual PME ratings for the same activity were very reliable (ICC = 0.995, mean absolute difference = 0.03 ± 0.17). PMEs show promise as a reliable measure of mental effort.
- Subject
- mental effort; time use; daily activities; aging
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1484754
- Identifier
- uon:51415
- Identifier
- ISSN:0531-5565
- Language
- eng
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