Social Cognition and Aging

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed research will examine aging-related changes in cognitive functioning, with the goal of understanding how normative changes in basic cognitive skills, goals, and knowledge influence functioning in everyday contexts. It is assumed that the ability to acquire and accurately represent information from social contexts is an important predictor of adaptive functioning. Much information relating to everyday functioning (e.g., medical, financial, consumer) is transmitted through social contexts, including the media (e.g., television, newspapers) and interactions with others (e.g., physicians, financial planners). Thus, it is important to understand the impact that aging might have on reasoning in such contexts. In this research, it is hypothesized that aging-related decrements in the efficiency of basic cognitive functions negatively impact upon older adults' ability to control attention and operate on information in memory. This, in turn, results in reductions in the accuracy of decisions and judgments with aging due to less specificity of information in memory and a concomitant increase in the impact of irrelevant information. It is also hypothesized, however, that older adults adapt to these negative changes in basic cognitive functions by (a) being more selective in their expenditure of limited resources and (b) developing powerful interpretive knowledge structures that permit complex thinking with minimum drain on cognitive resources. These two factors may help explain why many older adults continue to function effectively in everyday life. In this research, adults aged from 20 to 85 wilt be tested in laboratory analogues of everyday situations to examine the impact of these two types of influences on representation and decision-making. Experiments will be conducted in which specific age-related factors are isolated and manipulated in order to gauge their impact on performance. Observed age-related differences will also be examined in relation to ability, health, and other contextual factors in order to better understand potential causal mechanisms. The long-term goat is the development of a model that will describe aging effects on social cognition in order to assist us in understanding the factors that influence older adults' functioning in everyday life. This should also facilitate our ability to structure environments to maximize adaptation to the aging process.