Aging and Categorization: Could Relevant Pieces of Information Reduce Older Persons' Inhibitory Deficit?

Abstract

The goal of this study was to reduce the inhibitory deficit on the elderly by creating "optimizing conditions" in a categorization task. It was hypothesized that increasing the number of relevant pieces of information would reduce the difficulty associated with processing irrelevant information on a categorization task, since the number of relevant solutions to solve the problem would increase, while the total number of pieces of information to be processed would remain the same. This hypothesis was tested on 27 young adults and 30 elderly people using a task requiring the matching of a stimulus figure to one of the two response figures having one or more attributes in common with the stimulus. In line with previous findings, the results indicated an age-related inhibitory decline. However, consistent with the hypothesis, as the number of relevant attributes increased, the performance of elderly people improved and response times decreased, supporting the notion of latent cognitive resources.

Metacognition, Executive Functions and Aging: The Effect of Training in the Use of Metacognitive Skills to Solve Mathematical Word Problems

“…In traditional problem-solving tasks, there is a linear improvement in performance up to the age of about 30, followed by a linear decline. For practical, more ecological problem-solving tasks, there is a linear improvement up to the age of about 40, followed by a decline (Denney 1990;Jeantin and Pennequin 2006;Pennequin et al 2004;Lauverjat et al 2005). One hypothesis is that some of the declines observed during aging may not be due to mental regression but rather to suboptimal cognitive functioning in elderly people up to the age of 80 (Baltes 1987;Staudinger et al 1993;Stern 2003).…”