BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Dev. Psychol.
Sec. Social and Emotional Development
Volume 3 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fdpys.2025.1649507
This article is part of the Research TopicSocial Influences on Ontogenetic DevelopmentView all 4 articles
You Know What I Mean! Idiosyncratic Cueing Supports Older Couples' Communication Efficiency
Provisionally accepted
- 1Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Germany
- 2Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena, Jena, Germany
- 3Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, Frankfurt a. M., Germany
- 4Center for Lifespan Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany
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Collaborating with others on cognitive tasks may allow individuals to perform better than working alone. Therefore, researchers have argued that collaborative cognition may help individuals compensate for age-related cognitive decline. However, interacting with others also poses cognitive demands that become more challenging with aging. This study examined an interpersonal resource that can ease this quandary: familiar partners' spontaneous use of idiosyncratic cues in a communication-efficiency task. Idiosyncratic cues are references to familiar partners' previously established, shared knowledge. The usage of such cues might alleviate cognitive load to a greater extent than references to generic knowledge. We therefore hypothesized that older adults' communication efficiency would be particularly enhanced with the use of idiosyncratic cues. Thirty-eight younger couples (76 individuals, Mage = 26.64 years) and forty older couples (80 individuals, Mage =71.59 years) collaborated on a communication-efficiency task based on the game Taboo©. Partners explained target words to each other, using as few words as possible. 1,763 cueing episodes were transcribed and content-coded for idiosyncratic cues (ICC = .91). Multilevel regression models showed that communication efficiency was enhanced with more idiosyncratic cueing in older, but not younger couples. However, the interaction effect between age group and idiosyncratic cueing was not statistically significant. When the analyses were repeated in a subsample of difficult target words, both age groups profited from idiosyncratic cueing. These results suggest that personally tailored cues based on shared knowledge may facilitate everyday communication if task demands are high – a resource situation that becomes more likely as people age.
Keywords: collaborative cognition, interpersonal cueing, common ground, cognitive aging, Idiosyncratic Knowledge
Received: 18 Jun 2025; Accepted: 23 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Rauers, Schmiedek, Lindenberger and Riediger. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Antje Rauers, antje.rauers@uni-jena.de
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