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Testing the Foreign Language Effect on Cognitive Reflection in Older Adults
An increasing number of people around the world communicate in more than one language, resulting in them having to make decisions in a foreign language on a daily basis. Interestingly, a burgeoning body of literature suggests that people’s decision-making is affected by whether they are reasoning in...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
MDPI
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8615733/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34827525 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11111527 |
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author | Vega-Mendoza, Mariana Hansson, Patrik Sörman, Daniel Eriksson Ljungberg, Jessica K. |
author_facet | Vega-Mendoza, Mariana Hansson, Patrik Sörman, Daniel Eriksson Ljungberg, Jessica K. |
author_sort | Vega-Mendoza, Mariana |
collection | PubMed |
description | An increasing number of people around the world communicate in more than one language, resulting in them having to make decisions in a foreign language on a daily basis. Interestingly, a burgeoning body of literature suggests that people’s decision-making is affected by whether they are reasoning in their native language (NL) or their foreign language (FL). According to the foreign language effect (FLe), people are less susceptible to bias in many decision-making tasks and more likely to display utilitarian cost-benefit analysis in moral decision-making when reasoning in a FL. While these differences have often been attributed to a reduced emotionality in the FL, an emerging body of literature has started to test the extent to which these could be attributable to increased deliberation in the FL. The present study tests whether increased deliberation leads to a FLe on cognitive reflection in a population of older adults (M(age) = 65.1), from the successful aging project in Umeå, Sweden. We explored whether performance on a 6-item version of the cognitive reflection test (CRT) adapted to Swedish would differ between participants for whom Swedish was their NL and those for whom Swedish was their FL. The CRT is a task designed to elicit an incorrect, intuitive answer. In order to override the intuitive answer, one requires engaging in deliberative, analytical thinking to determine the correct answer. Therefore, we hypothesized that if thinking in a FL increases deliberation, then those performing the task in their FL would exhibit higher accuracy rates than those performing in their NL. Our results showed that age and level of education predicted performance on the task but performance on the CRT did not differ between the NL and the FL groups. In addition, in the FL group, proficiency in the FL was not related to performance in the CRT. Our results, therefore, do not provide evidence that thinking in a FL increases deliberation in a group of older adults performing a logical reasoning task that is not typically associated with an emotional connotation. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8615733 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | MDPI |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-86157332021-11-26 Testing the Foreign Language Effect on Cognitive Reflection in Older Adults Vega-Mendoza, Mariana Hansson, Patrik Sörman, Daniel Eriksson Ljungberg, Jessica K. Brain Sci Article An increasing number of people around the world communicate in more than one language, resulting in them having to make decisions in a foreign language on a daily basis. Interestingly, a burgeoning body of literature suggests that people’s decision-making is affected by whether they are reasoning in their native language (NL) or their foreign language (FL). According to the foreign language effect (FLe), people are less susceptible to bias in many decision-making tasks and more likely to display utilitarian cost-benefit analysis in moral decision-making when reasoning in a FL. While these differences have often been attributed to a reduced emotionality in the FL, an emerging body of literature has started to test the extent to which these could be attributable to increased deliberation in the FL. The present study tests whether increased deliberation leads to a FLe on cognitive reflection in a population of older adults (M(age) = 65.1), from the successful aging project in Umeå, Sweden. We explored whether performance on a 6-item version of the cognitive reflection test (CRT) adapted to Swedish would differ between participants for whom Swedish was their NL and those for whom Swedish was their FL. The CRT is a task designed to elicit an incorrect, intuitive answer. In order to override the intuitive answer, one requires engaging in deliberative, analytical thinking to determine the correct answer. Therefore, we hypothesized that if thinking in a FL increases deliberation, then those performing the task in their FL would exhibit higher accuracy rates than those performing in their NL. Our results showed that age and level of education predicted performance on the task but performance on the CRT did not differ between the NL and the FL groups. In addition, in the FL group, proficiency in the FL was not related to performance in the CRT. Our results, therefore, do not provide evidence that thinking in a FL increases deliberation in a group of older adults performing a logical reasoning task that is not typically associated with an emotional connotation. MDPI 2021-11-18 /pmc/articles/PMC8615733/ /pubmed/34827525 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11111527 Text en © 2021 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
spellingShingle | Article Vega-Mendoza, Mariana Hansson, Patrik Sörman, Daniel Eriksson Ljungberg, Jessica K. Testing the Foreign Language Effect on Cognitive Reflection in Older Adults |
title | Testing the Foreign Language Effect on Cognitive Reflection in Older Adults |
title_full | Testing the Foreign Language Effect on Cognitive Reflection in Older Adults |
title_fullStr | Testing the Foreign Language Effect on Cognitive Reflection in Older Adults |
title_full_unstemmed | Testing the Foreign Language Effect on Cognitive Reflection in Older Adults |
title_short | Testing the Foreign Language Effect on Cognitive Reflection in Older Adults |
title_sort | testing the foreign language effect on cognitive reflection in older adults |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8615733/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34827525 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci11111527 |
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