ABSTRACT
There is little doubt that, as we age, our cognitive abilities are more vulnerable to decline. It is also clear that when explaining cognitive decline, researchers often focus more on biological markers (the most important being a person’s age) than on psychological markers such as an individual’s self-definition and the way he or she is perceived and categorized by others. This is unfortunate because, and as the opening quote illustrates, there might be many (good) reasons why there are differences between the way in which a person appears to others (e.g., on the basis of their biological age) and that person’s understanding of themselves. Moreover, as we will see, these differences can have nontrivial consequences. Indeed, in this chapter we argue that biological markers offer limited insight into cognitive deterioration because they cannot help us to understand why cognitive trajectories vary considerably within a population and why it also seems possible to
dramatically alter and slow cognitive decline. To redress this imbalance, we seek to focus on social determinants of cognitive change and, in particular, to try to understand how people’s self-categorizations (as determined by their ties with others) influence their cognitive health as they age. Indeed, on this basis, we conclude that our quest for the Holy Grail should have a far more commonplace focus than is customary.
