Functional independence in older adulthood requires cognitive capacity and the ability to monitor, regulate, and adapt behavior in everyday contexts. To synthesize evidence on associations between executive-function and metacognitive or self-regulatory processes and functional independence in cognitively healthy, community-dwelling older adults, and to use bibliometric mapping as a secondary method to examine whether these research traditions have developed in an integrated or fragmented manner. A PRISMA 2020 systematic review with secondary bibliometric mapping was conducted. Forty studies were charted; after an eligibility and measurement-classification re-audit, 30 were retained in the core synthesis. Study characteristics, constructs, outcomes, and assessment modalities were extracted. Five studies contributed executive-function evidence without a metacognitive or self-regulatory measure, 16 examined executive functioning with a metacognitive or self-regulatory indicator, and nine examined executive functioning alongside an adjacent functional-cognitive construct. No study examined a metacognitive or self-regulatory predictor without an executive-function measure. Executive-function measures were frequently associated with instrumental activities of daily living, functional capacity, everyday cognition, adherence, and simulated everyday-task outcomes. Metacognitive and self-regulatory evidence was smaller and more heterogeneous, involving self-appraisal, awareness, error monitoring, checking behavior, and strategy use. Evidence was predominantly cross-sectional and associative. Bibliometric mapping indicated partially separate intellectual traditions. Executive functioning is the more consistently studied correlate of functional independence in healthy aging. Metacognitive and self-regulatory processes may contribute to functional adaptation, but their independent contribution remains insufficiently established. Future longitudinal, experimental, and multimodal research should integrate executive-function assessment, direct metacognitive measures, contextual determinants, and everyday-life functional outcomes.
Social content and thinking about information in relation to the self may attenuate age-related declines in associative memory. However, it's unclear whether these strategies are similarly effective across cultures due to potential differences in the prioritization of social and self-relevant information. The present study compared Taiwanese and American younger and older adults on associative memory for social information across two encoding conditions. Specifically, they related object-scene image pairs containing varying levels of social information (i.e. none, low and high) to themselves (i.e. self-referencing) or to a distant-other (i.e. other-referencing). We replicated a prior finding in a new sample of Taiwanese participants in which other-referencing (vs self-referencing) enhanced older adults' memory for high social trials, relative to younger adults. In contrast, this pattern did not emerge for Americans; older American participants' memory performance was relatively consistent across self- vs. other-referencing and the level of social information, and there was no interaction with age. These findings suggest that cultural differences in memory for high social (relative to low and nonsocial) information emerge for older, but not younger, adults, particularly when participants are asked to think about another person. Therefore, culture may influence the effectiveness of strategies to reduce age-related associative memory impairments.
People frequently think about how events in the past might have happened differently and these thoughts play a central role in their cognitive, emotional and social functioning. Our study examined how these processes change with age. A group of 56 younger (mean age 22.34) and 50 older (mean age 71.96) adults completed tasks measuring the spontaneous generation of counterfactual thoughts, the generation of counterfactual thoughts when cued and the Counterfactual Inference Test which taps into the ease with which salient counterfactual thoughts come to mind. They also completed a Counterfactual Seeking Task to measure their motivation to seek out counterfactual outcomes of unchosen events. In addition, participants completed measures of executive functioning and working memory capacity. Older adults generated fewer counterfactual thoughts across all measures and were marginally less likely to seek counterfactual information. Our performance measures of counterfactual thinking were independent suggesting that they tap into different processes. Age related changes in executive functioning were associated with a reduction in cued counterfactual thinking but not with our other measures of counterfactual thinking which may be more automatic. The results have important implications for cognition, emotion and well-being in older age.
Music holds a unique capacity to involuntarily and rapidly evoke autobiographical memories (AMs), yet the source of its cueing ability is unspecified. It is also unclear how well music continues to serve as a memory cue across the lifespan. In experiment 1, we examined what components of music are most beneficial in evoking AMs. Young adults (Mage = 19.13) were presented with 24 short 15-sec clips of popular songs from their youth as memory cues that were either unmodified, instrumental versions, lyrics-only, or a visual presentation of the song and artist name, intermixed within subjects. If they experienced a memory, they wrote a description of it. Unmodified song clips were most effective at evoking memories, and the number recalled was enhanced in those high in trait music-related reward sensitivity. Given the powerful cueing effect of music on AMs, in experiment 2, we examined whether the findings would generalize to an older adult population and whether music could serve to reduce age-related episodic memory deficits. Strikingly, song cues evoked more AMs in older than in younger adults. In both experiments, we observed a temporal alignment between the year of popularity of the song cue and the time frame of the evoked memory. We propose that songs are particularly effective memory cues because they set a temporal context, constraining the search for AMs to a specific point in time and facilitating access. Songs are powerful memory cues, particularly for older adults who may have difficulty spontaneously recreating context.
While future-oriented thinking is central to psychological adaptation in later life, little is known about the most effective ways to support future self-projection in older adults. This study investigated whether manipulating the temporal distance of future projection and the presence of health-related reassurance could differentially enhance episodic memory, emotion regulation, and future time perspective (FTP). Healthy older adults (N = 118) were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: imagining themselves five years in the future, imagining themselves living five more years in good health, imagining themselves living twenty more years in good health, or a control condition. Episodic memory was assessed through free recall, and emotion regulation and FTP were measured using validated self-report scales. Results revealed two main findings and one trend. First, memory performance was significantly higher in the 20 year projection with health reassurance than in any other condition. Second, FTP and cognitive reappraisal increased across all experimental conditions compared to the control. The 5 year projection with health reassurance produced the strongest effects: it significantly exceeded the 5 year condition on cognitive reappraisal, and showed the strongest effect on FTP, with significantly higher unlimited than limited scores, though not differing significantly from the other experimental conditions. No group differences emerged for emotional suppression. These findings suggest that distinct forms of future self-projection can differentially influence cognitive performance and motivational orientations, underscoring functional links between episodic simulation and psychological adaptation in later life.
Affective forecasting, the process of predicting future feelings, is key for decision-making, but prone to errors. Prior research suggests that age differences in forecasting accuracy vary by event valence such that older adults tend to be more accurate than younger adults when imagining how they will feel following positive events but less accurate when imagining how they will feel following negative events. This study tested whether a brief defocusing instruction could reduce affective forecasting errors and attenuate these age differences. In the week prior to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, younger (ages 18-35) and older (ages 58-79) U.S. voters (N = 670) predicted how they would feel in the week following the election under three scenarios: their preferred candidate winning, their preferred candidate losing, or the result being too close to call. Prior to making these forecasts, participants were randomly assigned to either a control or defocusing condition. Those in the defocusing condition were reminded to consider not only the election but also other daily life events that might shape their feelings. One week after the election, participants reported their actual post-election feelings. Results replicated prior findings: older adults made more accurate forecasts than younger adults when their preferred candidate won, but less accurate forecasts when their candidate lost. However, the defocusing instruction did not improve affective forecasting accuracy for either age group. This null finding suggests that simply prompting participants to consider daily life is insufficient to counter focalism, highlighting the need for more structured interventions in future research.
Verbal fluency tasks provide a sensitive measure of lexical retrieval and executive control. Beyond classical semantic and phonemic paradigms, complex variants such as the Alternating Fluency Task (EAF) and the Orthographic Constrained Semantic Fluency Task (EOCSF) impose higher demands on cognitive flexibility, inhibition, and strategic regulation. A total of 122 French-speaking adults were divided into two age groups (50-60 years, n = 61; 75+ years, n = 61). Participants completed both the EAF and EOCSF, each lasting 90 s. Linear regression and mixed-effects models with robust standard errors examined the effects of age, education, and time interval on productivity, clustering, switching, and error measures. Age-group differences were observed in overall performance, with older adults producing fewer correct words, particularly during early retrieval phases. This pattern supports a reduction in initiation speed and strategic control in older participants. Performance was lower in the EOCSF than in the EAF, reflecting higher inhibitory and monitoring demands. Education positively predicted total output and strategic efficiency - especially clustering - and attenuated age-group differences across both tasks. Age-group differences were most evident in initiation and flexibility, whereas education enhanced compensatory control and monitoring, consistent with a cognitive-reserve framework. The EAF and EOCSF thus offer complementary indices of executive - linguistic coordination and may increase the sensitivity of fluency assessment to early age-related changes.
The Memory Support Intervention was developed to improve poor memory for treatment by incorporating two different strategies into treatment: (1) constructive, where patients construct new ideas, inferences, or connections related to treatment content, and (2) non-constructive, which only highlight treatment content. The current study investigated the effects of delivering these strategies alongside treatment for midlife and older adults (≥ 60 years) with sleep difficulties, either experiencing cognitive impairment (CI; n = 29) or not (n = 30). Participants viewed video modules from the Transdiagnostic Intervention for Sleep and Circadian Dysfunction (TSC) and then received memory support. Aim 1 examined the effects of CI group and memory support type on recall. As expected, individuals with CI had poorer recall, but constructive memory supports reduced the difference between groups, suggesting constructive supports may be more effective than non-constructive memory supports in buffering against decline in recall for those with CI. Aim 2 evaluated the effects of CI and memory supports on thoughts and application of treatment content, but found no significant effects. Aim 3 examined how the number of treatment points affected recall. While an increase in points generally decreased recall, this was moderated by CI status and support type. Specifically, the decline in recall was most pronounced for the CI group following non-constructive supports. In contrast, constructive supports mitigated this impairment, resulting in comparable recall between groups when a larger amount of content was presented. Overall, constructive strategies may be particularly effective for helping individuals with CI better remember treatment content.
Experimental evidence consistently demonstrates older adults often perform worse than younger adults across various cognitive domains. Prior studies reported that older adults with high lifetime stress perform worse on working memory and inhibitory tasks than both younger individuals and older adults with low stress. Notably, low-stress older adults performas well as younger adults, indicating that life-time cumulative stress, rather than age alone, may drive some cognitive decline during aging. However, this stress-age affect on attention, the underlying process of both working memory and inhibition is yet to be investigated. In this within-subjects cross-sectional online study 141 participants (n = 85 under 30 and n = 56 over 60) identified two target words in an Attentional Blink task. Participants also reported their lifetime and perceived stress and their state anxiety. Using linear mixed models and Bayes Factors, we provide evidence that age and lifetime stress predict overall attentional performance on the Attentional Blink task. This supports the hypothesis that older high life-time stress participants would score lower on the attentional task compared to older low-stress participants and younger participants. Due to the interconnected nature of attention, these results suggest the stress-age interaction could be a factor in other cognitive domains that are susceptible to age-related decline. On a positive note, the results also suggest that attentional decline during aging, like impairments in working memory and inhibition, may be exacerbated by factors outside of simply getting older (here, elevated lifetime exposure to stress) and may therefore, not be inevitable.
Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to infer mental states, includes multiple dimensions: the nature of mental states (i.e. cognitive and affective), level of recursive reasoning, and decoding-reasoning processes. Because previous studies have used diverse methodologies and have often focused on only one dimension of ToM, it remains difficult to draw clear conclusions about potential age-related effects. The aim of this study was to jointly assess the different dimensions of ToM and error type in the attribution of mental states during normal aging with validated tests conventionally used in research and clinical practice. Fifty-four young adults (18-40 years, M = 25.4 years, SD = 6.91), 53 middle-aged adults (41-60 years, M = 50.4 years, SD = 4.95) and 56 older adults (61-82 years, M = 70.4 years, SD = 5.13) were recruited. The different ToM dimensions were assessed with TOM-15 (i.e. cognitive ToM and recursive reasoning level), Picture of Facial Affect Test (i.e. affective ToM and decoding), Faux-pas task (i.e. cognitive and affective ToM and decoding-reasoning level) and the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (i.e. cognitive and affective ToM as well as the type of ToM error). The analysis showed a progressive age-related effect across all ToM dimensions, although the direction and magnitude of these effects varied depending on the contextual demands involved. These results align with our hypothesis, indicating that adults experience progressively greater difficulties in understanding and predicting others' behaviors. A multidimensional ToM assessment could better inform interventions tailored to the cognitive and affective social needs of older people.
Intermittent Theta-Burst Stimulation (iTBS) of the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC) has the potential to enhance cognitive function by inducing long-term potentiation-like effects, modulating cortical excitability and network plasticity. However, the precise effects of iTBS across specific cognitive domains, age groups, and hemispheres remains unclear. Fifty-three adults aged 19-73 years, participated in a within-subject crossover designed study, receiving iTBS to the left and right DLPFC across two sessions, spaced one week apart. Cognitive tasks assessed four cognitive domains of attention, working memory, sequence learning, and inhibition. Processing speed and accuracy were assessed using time and hemisphere as fixed effects and age as a continuous variable in linear mixed effects and Bayesian models. There was an overall slowing of reaction time with age across all tasks. Brain stimulation reduced reaction times in attention and working memory tasks in all participants. Accuracy improved for working memory following iTBS, with a right hemisphere advantage. ITBS of the DLPFC influences cognition in a task-dependent manner. Improvements in attention were not influenced by hemisphere, suggesting a facilitation of top-up processing after DLPFC stimulation. Working memory enhancements were a dominant effect, especially following right hemisphere iTBS stimulation supporting lateralized optimization of visuospatial storage. These findings highlight iTBS as a potential noninvasive tool for cognitive enhancement. Future research should explore the longevity of these effects and their applicability in clinical populations.
Cognitive changes associated with aging bear both advantages and disadvantages for information processing that affect evaluations among older adults. Previous research showed that individuals evaluate objects more favorably when the object is framed positively (e.g. 85% success) rather than negatively (e.g. 15% failure). Evaluations are also sensitive to polarization levels of quantitative information (e.g. 90%/10% vs. 70%/30% success/failure). This paper examines how attribute framing and polarization levels moderate evaluations among older and younger adults. Study 1 examined older adults sampled from community centers for retired people and younger adults sampled in public places. The findings showed that older adults were more susceptible to attribute framing than younger adults, whereas their sensitivity to polarization levels was lower. To test older adults who are still working, Study 2 recruited both older and younger adults from an online panel. The findings replicated the effects of attribute framing and polarization level, but these effects were not significantly different across age groups. The difference between Study 1 and Study 2 in age-related effects suggests that chronological age is not the sole predictor of changes in evaluations and decision making among older adults. Future research should explore the contribution of cognitive - social aptitudes to these changes. The findings were interpreted in view of fuzzy-trace theory, suggesting that older adults rely more heavily on gist, owing to better experience-based abstractions, along with poorer verbatim representations, making them more susceptible to framing bias and less sensitive to polarization levels. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Objectives: Coherent speech remains focused on the topic at hand, avoiding irrelevant or tangential comments. Discourse coherence often declines with age and this has been linked to declines in cognitive control processes that regulate activation of knowledge and ideas. The present study tested whether external topic reminders could improve coherence by reducing reliance on internal control processes. Methods: 77 young and older adults produced spoken discourse in response to topic prompts. In the baseline condition, the topic prompt was removed when the participant began speaking. This was compared with conditions where a reminder was presented on screen, either throughout their response or only during the last 30 seconds. Results: Both age groups produced more coherent, topic-focused responses when they had access to a topic reminder. Late reminders had an additional proactive impact on participants’ speech, increasing its coherence even before the reminder appeared. This proactive effect was short-lived in the older group but more sustained in the young group. Discussion: When speaking, people must maintain the current discourse goal (i.e., intended topic), in order to prioritise relevant information and inhibit irrelevant ideas. Topic reminders boost activation of the discourse goal, reducing the need to maintain this through internal control. Furthermore, people proactively strengthened goal activation when they anticipated a later reminder, but older people were less effective at maintaining this throughout their response. Together, these results suggest that internal maintenance of discourse goals is less effective in older people, though they do benefit from external cues that support topic maintenance.
Studies of pattern separation have consistently shown poorer performance among older adults when identifying perceptually similar objects compared to younger adults, despite equal performance at recognizing repeated objects. Additionally, tasks that embed or overlay objects on contexts reliably show benefits from repeating the context but detriments when the context is shifted, particularly for older adults. However, it remains unclear as to how performance on these tasks generalize to everyday memory functioning. Pattern separation is likely critical for utilizing not only subtle perceptual details but also other rich sensory and semantic information that fill an episodic memory and often not accounted for on traditional object recognition tasks. In the present study, we designed a task to assess the memory for details of short narrative stories among younger (n = 20) and older adults (n = 20). Participants listened to 20 stories while viewing a unique picture of the context of the event, followed by a yes/no recognition task asking about an identical or semantically similar detail. Context during recognition was also manipulated, such that questions were paired in either the same, consistent, inconsistent, or Fourier-transformed image conditions. Older and younger adults did not differ when answering questions about the identical detail, but age interacted with context, such that the same context benefitted recognition memory for younger but not older adults. Surprisingly, older and younger adults did not differ when identifying similar details. Taken together, our results indicate that age-related impairments observed viewing visually similar objects may not extend to conceptually similar details of narrative stories.
Age-related declines in speech recognition are consistently linked to several interrelated factors - auditory acuity (peripheral and/or central), cognition, linguistic processing, neurophysiological efficiency, etc. These declines become more apparent in adverse listening conditions, such as informational masking, the additional masking effects that occur due to linguistic and/or cognitive confusions between the target sound and masker. In this study, we evaluated the age-related changes in the cortical representation of speech under different masking (informational vs energetic) and attention (active vs passive) conditions. We measured high-density cortical auditory evoked potentials (CAEPs) in 60 participants (30 young adults and 30 older adults) with clinically normal hearing (pure tone average <15 dB HL). CAEPs were recorded in the presence of informational and energetic (no linguistic information) maskers, while the participants either attended (active attention) or ignored (passive attention) the stimuli. Results showed that informational maskers caused significantly greater N1 latency delays than energetic maskers, with older adults showing significantly greater delays than younger adults. Active attention resulted in significantly larger N1 amplitudes compared to passive attention, with minimal age-related differences, possibly due to the strict criteria of auditory acuity in the older adult group. Further, microstate segmentation analyses, in addition to confirming the age-related delays in cortical responses (similar to N1 latencies), revealed longer engagement of fronto-central cortical regions under informational maskers, regardless of the presence of lexical-semantic information in the maskers. These findings, therefore, highlight the systematic effects of aging, attention, and linguistic complexity on the cortical representation of masked speech.
As genetic testing for Alzheimer's disease (AD) risk becomes increasingly accessible, it is important to understand how individuals respond to knowledge of their genetic risk. In this study, we examined whether awareness of being an APOE ɛ4 carrier, a genetic risk factor for late-onset AD dementia, adversely affects subjective and objective cognition. Participants were 195 cognitively unimpaired older adults (aged 63-79, Mage = 71.18), recruited from the Alzheimer's Prevention Initiative's GeneMatch program. All had undergone APOE testing, with 94 ε4 carriers and 32 non-carriers aware of their genotype, and 41 ε4 carriers and 28 non-carriers unaware. Subjective cognition was assessed using measures of memory control, attention control, and memory anxiety. Objective cognition was assessed with short-term memory, working memory, and episodic memory tasks. Results showed that ɛ4 carriers aware of their genotype were less confident that they could influence their cognitive functioning through effort and less confident that they could control their attention. Additionally, non-carriers aware of their genotype were less concerned they were currently developing AD, suggesting that disclosure may provide reassurance when genetic risk is absent. Awareness of genotype did not reliably affect objective cognition; however, exploratory analyses found that among ɛ4 carriers, awareness was associated with poorer working memory performance when it was assessed early in the test battery but better performance when assessed later. Together, these findings suggest that being aware of a heightened genetic risk for AD can undermine older adults' perceived cognitive control and, under certain conditions, produce transient adverse effects on working memory performance.
Existing literature on speech disfluencies in healthy aging often categorizes disfluencies as word-finding difficulties. However, it is important to acknowledge the multitude of potential underlying causes that contribute to speech disfluency and a more fine-grained analysis of disfluencies is needed. To this end, the current study used an experimental paradigm that can lead to the production of disfluencies due to Tip-Of- the-Tongue (TOT) states, which reflect word-finding difficulties with a phonological origin. Twenty-seven younger (aged <25 y/o) and 26 older (aged 60 – 72 y/o) participants performed a picture naming task involving newly learnt non-existing objects (TOT-objects) which were used to evoke TOT states. This study had two objectives: a) testing the potential of this paradigm to analyze TOTs and TOT resolution, and b) performing exploratory analyses of disfluencies related to TOT states and comparing those across the two age groups. The TOT-object paradigm elicited a substantial number of TOTs, making it suitable for examining these phenomena. We found no significant effect of age group on the number of TOTs. However, TOT states manifested themselves differently in younger and older participants. Sensitivity analyses indicated that older participants produced significantly more phonological errors during TOT states than younger participants, while younger participants showed a greater tendency towards silent pauses. These findings suggest that different causes underly TOTs in both age groups in younger and older adults.
Research suggests that aging accompanies an adaptive shift in strategic regulation of both emotion and learning. Strategic regulation plays a critical role in metacognition, or our ability to control, monitor, and modulate cognitive processes. Older adults prioritize emotional wellbeing and engage in regulating cognitive engagement based on internal motivation states as well as external environmental goals. There has been a large body of research focused on age-related shifts in regulation of cognitive and emotional processes to manage wellbeing and a large body of research examining how age-related metacognitive changes impact cognitive output. This review seeks to bridge these two domains of research and suggests that age-related cognitive changes may be better understood by considering the exchange between meta-affect (monitoring and control of emotions associated with cognitive processes) and metacognitive processes. This review also examines the socio-emotional factors that impact metacognition and specifically strategic regulation of cognitive resources associated with task engagement in older adults. In this paper, we propose that adaptive strategic regulation in older adults is the product of the integration of metacognitive and meta-affective processes. We propose that metacognition and meta-affect are intertwined, as internal emotional and cognitive goals influence the initial and ongoing understanding and evaluation of any cognitive task.
Evidence suggests that lifelong practice of two or more languages may contribute to cognitive reserve and protect against dementia. Most retrospective studies comparing bilinguals' and monolinguals' age at dementia onset report a delay for bilinguals. However, some studies suggest that such protective effects may be specific to certain types of dementia. Meanwhile, several prospective studies which investigated whether bilingualism reduces the incidence rate of dementia produced null results. Therefore, we conducted the first Bayesian meta-analysis to examine the relationship between bilingualism and age at onset of dementia and bilingualism and the incidence rate of dementia respectively. The results from 18 age at onset studies revealed that bilinguals were, on average, 3.45 years older than monolinguals at symptom onset (95% credible interval [CrI]: [2.8, 4.1]). Moreover, the result was only slightly influenced by years of education, although the effect of education on dementia remains uncertain. The results from six incidence rate studies did not provide robust evidence for bilingualism's preventive effect. Therefore, this meta-analysis demonstrated that bilingualism has potential effects in delaying the onset of dementia but not preventing it. Moreover, subgroup analyses revealed a relatively consistent pattern of delayed symptom onset among bilinguals, though the estimated delays differed across dementia types. However, due to the limited number of studies available for each dementia subtype, uncertainty remains regarding whether bilingualism induces differential effects across dementia types. This highlights the need for further research specifically targeting non-Alzheimer's dementias to better clarify these potential differences.
This study examined the relationships between fluid and imaging biomarkers associated with memory (cerebrospinal fluid growth-associated protein 43 [CSF GAP-43] and hippocampal volume) and episodic memory performance in 586 older adults (mean age = 72.6 years, SD = 7.2) from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative who completed CSF collection, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, and neuropsychological testing. Hierarchical linear regressions assessed whether FreeSurfer-derived total hippocampal volume or hippocampal subfield volume (subiculum, presubiculum, dentate gyrus, CA1) moderated the association between GAP-43 and episodic memory performance. GAP-43 and hippocampal volume were independently associated with episodic memory performance. Greater GAP-43 was associated with lower episodic memory performance in older adults with average or below-average (-1 SD) total and subfield (subiculum, presubiculum, dentate gyrus) hippocampal volume. No associations were observed in participants with above-average (+1 SD) volume. These findings suggest that GAP-43 may serve as a biomarker correlate of episodic memory impairment in those with average or below-average hippocampal volume.
