This literature review will examine the effects of motivation on mental activity in the aged. It will show that motivation significantly affects performance on a variety of tasks, but does not eliminate age-related cognitive deficits. The findings demonstrate that failure to consider the influence of motivation on performance in the aged can lead to an exaggeration of the magnitude of the deleterious effects of aging on cognitive functioning, and an increase in motivation can improve memory functioning in aged individuals, including those who are experiencing memory problems.

Statement of the problem

Historically, one of the major foci of experimental psychology was on variables associated with the phenomenon of learning. Because learning was differentiated from performance, an attempt was made to identify variables that affected performance versus those that affected learning. Specifically, it was recognized (Hull, 1943) that learning, defined as a relatively permanent change in behavioral potential, needed to be distinguished from performance, defined as the measurable expression of that which an organism had learned. Moreover, performance was not considered to be isomorphic with learning; rather, learning set an upper bound on performance. An organism could not display (perform) more than it had learned. On the other hand, an organism could and in most cases did perform at a lower level than that attained by learning.