Using computerized reaction-time tasks assessing automatic attitudes, studies have shown that healthy young adults have faster reaction times when approaching physical activity stimuli than when avoiding them. The opposite has been observed for sedentary stimuli. However, it is unclear whether these results hold across the lifespan and when error rates and a possible generic approach-avoidance tendency are accounted for. Here, reaction times and errors in online approach-avoidance tasks of 130 participants aged 21 to 77 years were analyzed using mixed-effects models. Automatic approach-avoidance tendencies were tested using physical activity, sedentary, and neutral stimuli. Explicit attitudes toward physical activity and intention to be physically active were self-reported. Results showed faster reaction times and fewer errors when approaching compared to avoiding physical activity stimuli before 45 years of age and faster reactions to avoiding compared to approaching sedentary stimuli after this age. These results suggest a tendency to approach physical activity stimuli in younger adults and a tendency to avoid sedentary stimuli older adults. However, reaction time and error results revealed a generic approach tendency in early adulthood and a generic avoidance tendency in late adulthood. When accounting for these generic tendencies, results no longer showed evidence of an effect of age on approach-avoidance tendencies toward physical activity stimuli but kept suggesting a greater tendency (i.e., fewer errors) to avoid sedentary stimuli in older adults. Both reaction-time and error results supported a tendency to approach physical activity stimuli and to avoid sedentary stimuli across age, when further accounting for sex-gender, level of physical activity, body mass index, and chronic health condition. Finally, exploratory analyses showed that approach-avoidance tendencies toward physical activity and sedentary stimuli were associated with explicit attitudes toward physical activity but showed no evidence of an association with the intention to be physically active.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Matthieu Boisgontier is supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC; RGPIN-2021-03153) and by the Banting Research Foundation. Boris Cheval is supported by an Ambizione grant (PZ00P1_180040) from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

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The Ethics committee of the University of Ottawa gave ethical approval for this work (H-05-21-6791).

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