Interoceptive Accuracy Enhances Deception Detection in Older Adults.

OBJECTIVES: Difficulties with deception detection may leave older adults especially vulnerable to fraud. Interoception, i.e., the awareness of one's bodily signals, has been shown to influence deception detection, but this relationship has not been examined in aging yet. The present study investigated effects of interoceptive accuracy on two forms of deception detection: detecting interpersonal lies in videos and identifying text-based deception in phishing emails. METHOD: Younger (18-34 years) and older (53-82 years) adults completed a heartbeat-detection task to determine interoceptive accuracy. Deception detection was assessed across two distinct, ecologically valid tasks: i) a lie detection task in which participants made veracity judgments of genuine and deceptive individuals, and ii) a phishing email detection task to capture online deception detection. Using multilevel logistic regression models, we determined the effect of interoceptive accuracy on lie and phishing detection in younger versus older adults. RESULTS: In older, but not younger, adults greater interoceptive accuracy was associated with better accuracy in both detecting deceptive people and phishing emails. DISCUSSION: Interoceptive accuracy was associated with both lie detection and phishing detection accuracy among older adults. Our findings identify interoceptive accuracy as a potential protective factor for fraud susceptibility, as measured through difficulty detecting deception. These results support interoceptive accuracy as a relevant factor for consideration in interventions targeted at fraud prevention among older adults.

Phishing vulnerability compounded by older age, apolipoprotein E e4 genotype, and lower cognition.

With technological advancements, financial exploitation tactics have expanded into the online realm. Older adults may be particularly susceptible to online scams due to age- and Alzheimer's disease-related changes in cognition. In this study, 182 adults ranging from 18 to 90 years underwent cognitive assessment, genotyping for apolipoprotein E e4 (APOE4), and completed the lab-based Short Phishing Email Suspicion Test (S-PEST) as well as the real-life PHishing Internet Task (PHIT). Across both paradigms, older age predicted heightened susceptibility to phishing, with this enhanced susceptibility pronounced among older APOE4 allele carriers with lower working memory. Additionally, performance in both phishing tasks was correlated in that reduced ability to discriminate between phishing and safe emails in S-PEST predicted greater phishing susceptibility in PHIT. The current study identifies older age, APOE4, and lower cognition as risk factors for phishing vulnerability and introduces S-PEST as an easy-to-administer, ecologically valid tool for assessing phishing susceptibility.

The Phishing Email Suspicion Test (PEST) a lab-based task for evaluating the cognitive mechanisms of phishing detection.

Phishing emails constitute a major problem, linked to fraud and exploitation as well as subsequent negative health outcomes including depression and suicide. Because of their sheer volume, and because phishing emails are designed to deceive, purely technological solutions can only go so far, leaving human judgment as the last line of defense. However, because it is difficult to phish people in the lab, little is known about the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying phishing susceptibility. There is therefore a critical need to develop an ecologically valid lab-based measure of phishing susceptibility that will allow evaluation of the cognitive mechanisms involved in phishing detection. Here we present such a measure based on a task, the Phishing Email Suspicion Test (PEST), and a cognitive model to quantify behavior. In PEST, participants rate a series of phishing and non-phishing emails according to their level of suspicion. By comparing suspicion scores for each email to its real-world efficacy, we find initial support for the ecological validity of PEST - phishing emails that were more effective in the real world were more effective at deceiving people in the lab. In the proposed computational model, we quantify behavior in terms of participants' overall level of suspicion of emails, their ability to distinguish phishing from non-phishing emails, and the extent to which emails from the recent past bias their current decision. Together, our task and model provide a framework for studying the cognitive neuroscience of phishing detection.

Is This Phishing? Older Age Is Associated With Greater Difficulty Discriminating Between Safe and Malicious Emails.

OBJECTIVES: As our social worlds become increasingly digitally connected, so too has concern about older adults falling victim to "phishing" emails, which attempt to deceive a person into identity theft and fraud. In the present study, we investigated whether older age is associated with differences in perceived suspiciousness of phishing emails. METHODS: Sixty-five cognitively normal middle-aged to older adults rated a series of genuine and phishing emails on a scale from definitely safe to definitely suspicious. RESULTS: Although older age was not related to a shift in overall perception of email safety, older age was related to worse discrimination between genuine and phishing emails, according to perceived suspiciousness. DISCUSSION: These findings suggest that cognitively normal older adults may be at particular risk for online fraud because of an age-associated reduction in their sensitivity to the credibility of emails.