Everyday cognition: Age and intellectual ability correlates.

Abstract

The primary aim of this study was to examine the relationship between a new battery of everyday cognition measures, which assessed 4 cognitive abilities within 3 familiar real-world domains, and traditional psychometric tests of the same basic cognitive abilities. Several theoreticians have argued that everyday cognition measures are somewhat distinct from traditional cognitive assessment approaches, and the authors investigated this assertion correlationally in the present study. The sample consisted of 174 community-dwelling older adults from the Detroit metropolitan area, who had an average age of 73 years. Major results of the study showed that (a) each everyday cognitive test was strongly correlated with the basic cognitive abilities; (b) several basic abilities, as well as measures of domain-specific knowledge, predicted everyday cognitive performance; and (c) everyday and basic measures were similarly related to age. The results suggest that everyday cognition is not unrelated to traditional measures, nor is it less sensitive to age-related differences. The present study was conducted to address two questions regarding older adults' cognitive performance with problems drawn from everyday life. First, the validity of several newly developed cognitive assessments using "everyday" stimuli was assessed. Specifically, in this study we examined the relationships between traditional psychometric measures and a new battery of everyday intellectual tasks. Second, within an ethnically heterogeneous sample of older adults ranging from 60 to over 90 years of age, we investigated whether age differences found with everyday cognition measures were similar to those found with psychometric ability tests or whether the greater familiarity and relevance of tasks using real-world stimuli might attenuate cross-sectional age differences as some theorists have proposed. For the purposes of this study, everyday cognition was conceptualized as the performance of individuals on problems using natural stimuli (e.g., real food package labels or official documents), and the problems were constructed to be similar to tasks older individuals might actually be called on to perform in their daily lives (e.g., identifying nutrition information or comparing the value of different financial products). This study is embedded in a larger body of research concerned with understanding the cognitive performance of individuals in the context of their daily lives. Specifically, proponents of the ecological approach have maintained that in the real world individuals can draw on domain-relevant experiences and naturalistic motivations to enhance their cognitive performance (e.g., Ceci & Bronfenbrenner, 1991; Neisser, 1978, 1991; Weisz, 1978) and that relatively "acontextual" laboratory-based assessments of cognition may produce an underestimation of true performance competencies (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Conway, 1991; Wagner, 1986). Historically, it has also been argued that traditional or academic measures of cognition and intelligence are biased tow...

Well- and ill-defined measures of everyday cognition: Relationship to older adults' intellectual ability and functional status.

“…For the ECB Inductive Reasoning test, participants had to generate answers, and for the ECB Declarative Memory and Knowledge tests, participants had to recognize answers. Results from previous analysis with the full parent sample from which this study is drawn (Allaire & Marsiske, 1999) indicated that the internalconsistency reliability of each ECB test was adequate, with Cronbach alpha estimates ranging from .69 to .88. Additional information regarding the content, structure, and psychometric characteristics of the ECB tests are provided in Allaire and Marsiske (1999).…”

“…Comparisons between the current sample and the subsample of participants who completed the OEEPT (n ϭ 130) and those participants in the larger sample who did not (n ϭ 44) indicated that the two groups did not significantly differ in age, t (172) ($14,905). A detailed description of the parent sample (N ϭ 174) is provided in Allaire and Marsiske (1999). Participants received a small honorarium ($20) for their participation.…”

“…Three of the tests from the Everyday Cognition Battery (ECB; Allaire & Marsiske, 1999) were included as representatives of the well-defined 1 Preliminary analyses were conducted to ensure that men and woman were similar with respect to the major study variables. Results indicated that the performance of men and women were statistically equivalent on the measures of basic cognitive functioning, t(128) ϭ 0.52, p Ͼ .05, on the well-defined measure of everyday cognition, t(128) ϭ 0.35, p Ͼ .05, on the solution fluency score, t(128) ϭ 1.35, p Ͼ .05, and on the solution quality score, t(128) ϭ 1.16, p Ͼ .05, of the ill-defined everyday cognition measures, as well as on overall everyday instrumental functioning, t(128) ϭ 0.38, p Ͼ .05. approach to the assessment of everyday cognition.…”

“…The Declarative Memory factor was identified by the three trial scores of the HVLT (Trial 1, Trial 2, and Trial 3). As reported in Allaire and Marsiske (1999), the three basic cognitive ability factors represent the best fitting, most parsimonious solution for these psychometric data, although, given their strong relationships, a second-order general intelligence factor could clearly have been estimated. Tables 3 and 4. To determine the relative relationship of each basic cognitive ability factor with the three everyday cognitive factors, we specified a structural model, which included direct regression paths from each basic cognitive ability factor (i.e., Basic Inductive Reasoning, Basic Knowledge, and Basic Declarative Memory) to the three everyday problem-solving factors.…”

Characterizing and Explaining Differences in Cognitive Test Performance Between African American and European American Older Adults

“…Furthermore, Whitfield (1996Whitfield ( , 2002 suggested that studies should examine the practical aspects of cognitive functioning, including performance on measures of everyday problem solving, in the assessment of cognitive status. In general, everyday problem solving measures, by assessing cognition within contextually relevant domains (i.e., medication use, transportation, and other instrumental activities of daily living), have been thought to have more ecological value in determining older adults' daily functioning, than traditional cognitive measures (Allaire & Marsiske, 1999;Willis, 1991).…”