ABSTRACT

The main tasks for cognitive gerontology are to describe how mental abilities change with age and to relate these observations to the ageing of the brain and central nervous system. There has been much progress in identifying age-related changes in memory and in relating these to neurophysiology (Moscovitch & Winocur, 1992). In contrast, excellent descriptive studies of other cognitive abilities, such as problem solving, selective attention, and the ability to make rapid decisions, have not yet led to useful functional models of changes in cognitive processes or of the relationships of these changes to the ageing of the brain. This is partly because speculation has been dominated by the idea that agerelated changes in cognitive skills are all alike, entrained by degradation of a single performance parameter, information-processing speed.