Aging Effects on Brain and Cognition: What Do We Learn from a Strategy Perspective?

Abstract

In this chapter, we provide an overview of how a strategy perspective fruitfully contributes to our understanding of aging effects on cognitive functioning and brain activations. We review previous research showing that people use a wide variety of strategies to accomplish cognitive tasks and how strategy use evolves during aging. Although strategic variations are modulated by individual differences and experimental conditions, older adults have been found to use fewer strategies, to use the more demanding strategies less often, to select the most appropriate strategy on each problem less often, and to be less efficient when executing a given strategy than young adults. Adopting a strategy approach enables better characterization of age-related changes observed in brain activations during task completion and contributes to specify the mechanistic and functional significance of age-related changes in neural recruitments. Finally, we review recent evidence suggesting that cognitive control processes underlie age-related changes in strategy use.

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