ABSTRACT
As a consequence of the aging of our population, clinicians are increasingly being asked to assess the cognitive functioning of older people. This chapter addresses important issues in the assessment of cognition, and in particular, executive functioning, in older adults. More specifically, we describe the nature of our aging population, and discuss the relationship between health status and cognition. We also propose suitable approaches to the cognitive assessment of older people, in particular appropriate measures of executive function (EF) in the aged, and present the age-related changes in executive functioning that occur in older adults. Case studies will be presented to illustrate the issues raised in this chapter. Critical to the assessment of executive functioning in older adults is an under-
standing of what constitutes a normal performance on measures of EF. To examine this question, data obtained from a recent study on normal cognitive performance in healthy older adults in the age range 65-94 (Wardill, 2003) will be presented. Not only can this normative data be used by clinicians to evaluate an individual’s performance, but it also provides information on how the aging process impacts on executive functioning.
