I interpreted the paper slightly differently: The older you get, the harder it is to tell whether you understand something. The authors are not sure exactly why

I interpreted the paper slightly differently: The older you get, the harder it is to tell whether you understand something. The authors are not sure exactly why: > Why do older adults fail to represent sufficient levels of uncertainty? One possibility is that representing appropriate levels of uncertainty requires a cognitive and/or biological resource that decays across healthy aging. One obvious candidate for such a resource is working memory capacity. ... > Another possibility is that older adults fail to represent sufficient levels of uncertainty because they have an aversion to uncertainty or the mental effort required to represent it. ... > The crucial factor limiting uncertainty representations in older adults could, and at some level must be, biological in nature. One candidate for such a limiting factor is norepinephrine ... > Although it is tempting to link age-related changes in representing uncertainty to reduction of a single neurotransmitter, several alternative biological accounts exist. ...