Cognitive Strategy Variations During Aging

The last two decades of research in cognitive aging have seen a shift from simply describing age-related changes in cognitive performance to determining the mechanisms underlying these changes. Recent findings on variations in the use of cognitive strategies during aging further our understanding of how these changes in performance occur during adulthood. Data show age-related differences in strategy repertoire, strategy distribution, strategy execution, and strategy selection. I illustrate these findings in cognitive domains as varied as episodic memory, working memory, reasoning, decision making, problem solving, and language. I discuss how strategic variations are best studied both conceptually and methodologically and how investigating strategic variations helps us make significant progress in the study of cognitive aging. As I also show in this article, whichever the cognitive domain being studied, there are no restrictions that would prevent us from adopting a strategy perspective.