Moderators of Cognitive Aging : The Role of Strategies. – CogAging

1- Experimental studies to collect behavioural and neuro-physiological indicators of cognitive ageing.
2- Two target areas of study: arithmetic problems solving; episodic memory.
3- Two target moderators: the effects of age-based stereotype threat; the effects of prior-task success and failure.
4- Manipulations of key experimental factors: characteristics of problems (in arithmetic) and items (in memory); characteristics of situations (threat induction of stereotype; induction of piror-task success/failure ).
5- Studies of the effects of individual characteristics: e.g. arithmetic fluency; expertise and basic level of episodic memory.
6- Behavioural indicators: performance (response times, % of errors, % of strategic use, reminder clustering measures).
7- Neurophysiological indicators: ERP, MEG.
8- Statistical analyses: frequentists and Baysian analyses. ANOVAs, regression-correlation; conditional probabilities.

1- Numerous experimental results.

(a) The threat of stereotyping has led older people to

- to obtain decreased cognitive performance relative to their potentially best performance,
- completely change the chain of mental mechanisms (strategies) used to accomplish a cognitive task,
- change the number of strategies used to perform a cognitive task, but also the relative frequency of strategy use, and how to execute and select the different strategies available.
- the magnitude of standard experimental effects in the fields of arithmetic problem solving and episodic memory (encoding and retrieval of information in long-term memory), such as operand size effects, characteristics of the words to be memorized.

(b) effects of prior-task success or failure

- are different for young and old. Young people are sensitive to both prior-task success and failure, while older people are sensitive only to success.
- appeared both in arithmetic (where they had never been tested before) and in episodic memory (where they had already been demonstrated).
- are accompanied by systematic strategic variations (strategy repertoire, distribution, execution and selection), but which change with age (e.g., prior-task success does not seem to affect strategy execution as significantly in youth as in the elderly, while effects on strategic selection are comparable in both age groups).

(c) Electrophysiological markers (P300, N400) associated with the effects of stereotyping and success/failure in a prior task are comparable in both domains and among youth and older adults.

(d) The strategic variations associated with aging and its moderators have, from these results in the fields of arithmetic and memory, been generalised to metacognition.

A- Empirically:

The results here obtained need to be

- replicated and generalized to other areas of cognition (e.g., attention, reasoning),
- refined and specified for certain variables (e.g., item characteristics)
- extended in other situations and tasks, including arithmetic and episodic memory (e.g., are all the mechanisms of memory affected in the same way by the moderators studied and, yes, are the same mechanisms or strategic variations at work?).
- extended, as they began to be, to other cognitive functions, such as metacognition, but also to other life stages (in children). Preliminary results suggest that this is the case.


- Theoretically:

The results obtained here show the effects of moderators on strategic variations. A more precise explanation should consider the determinants of these strategic variations, such as executive functions and/or emotional factors. For example, does the decline in the quality of strategic selection under stereotype threat in the elderly result from a decrease in the effectiveness of executive control mechanisms? As another example, does the threat trigger negative emotions that have deleterious effects on attentional mechanisms?

- At the clinical level:

The present results suggest a number of clinical implications, both in diagnostic and management aspects. For example, neutralizing the deleterious effects of stereotypes or prior task failure in older adults could avoid false positives in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease or could help optimize cognitive stimulation and optimization programs for the elderly.

The successful execution of the present research project has been scientifically very productive, with more than 30 publications, most of them in the most prestigious journals in our discipline, and they are already highly cited.

This project will determine the mechanisms by which moderators of cognitive aging decrease (and sometimes cancel) age-related declines in cognitive performance. We shall test the strategic variations hypothesis. That is, these moderators decrease age-related declines in cognition via older adults’ changing the type and number of strategies, as well as how they execute and select strategies on each item. We shall test three targeted moderators: personality (workpackage 1), age-based stereotype threat (workpackage 2), and prior task success (workpackage 3). The effects of each of these moderators will first be investigated separately in different cognitive domains (episodic memory) and then together for the same individuals (Workpackage 4). In a series of 17 experiments, we shall collect behavioral data (latency, accuracy, strategy use) and brain-imaging (ERP, MEG) data. Expected findings will determine whether older adults (a) who are open-minded undergo less age-related cognitive declines thanks to using most efficient strategies and/or executing and selecting available strategies more efficiently on each item, (b) who undergo age-based stereotype threat experiences obtain poorer cognitive performance because stereotype threat leads them to use poorer strategies and/or to execute and select strategies on each problem more poorly, and (c) who successfully accomplish a first task display no-age related differences in target tasks via use of better strategies and/or better executing and selecting available strategies on each item. This project will examine both domain-specific and domain-general strategic variations underlying effects of moderators on cognitive aging. Significance of the expected findings are high as they will shed important lights on cognitive aging and its determiners as well as how non-cognitive factors influence human cognition.