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.
Numeracy has important implications across the lifespan, and age-related decline in this ability represents a vulnerability factor for older adults in managing everyday tasks, yet its mechanisms remain poorly understood. This study employed a parity judgment task to examine age-related differences in basic numerical representation in younger and older adults using three stimulus types: Arabic digits (symbolic), dot arrays (non-symbolic), and finger configurations (embodied non-symbolic), to capture the multiple representational formats supporting numeracy. Sixty healthy participants (31 young adults, 25.3 ± 4.83 years; 29 older adults, 69.8 ± 4.53 years) completed the task while EEG was recorded. Response latency and accuracy were measured, and neural correlates of numerical processing were analyzed, focusing on P1 and N1 components at parieto-occipital sites. Multivariate pattern analysis assessed differences in EEG responses across numerical formats. Accuracy was high and did not differ reliably by age or stimulus type, whereas reaction times were influenced by both age and stimulus type. Early ERP components were sensitive to stimulus format, with dot arrays eliciting longer N1 latency and lower P1 amplitude. Age further prolonged N1 latency and interacted with stimulus format on N1 amplitude, with reduced responses to finger configurations in young adults. MVPA analyses showed that the neural correlates supporting symbolic, non-symbolic, and embodied non-symbolic numerical representations are distinct, suggesting reliance on separate neural processes. Overall, this study offers a comprehensive account of how different forms of numerical information are represented in the aging brain, highlighting the multifaceted and age-sensitive nature of numerical reasoning.
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.
