ABSTRACT
What are the implications of an aging cognitive system for providing accurate answers to questions-questions about one’s health, one’s life, one’s opinions about politicians and public policy? In raising this question, the issue of primary concern is not whether accuracy at answering questions simply declines with age, but more importantly, whether the nature of biases present in question answering is interactive with age. This chapter provides an overview of cognitive mechanisms that are age sensitive and that may cause older people to answer questions differently from young adults due to capacity limitations. In this chapter, I will initially describe age differences in fundamental cognitive mechanisms that are indices of how much mental processing power or cognitive resource an individual might bring to bear in a situation. I hypothesize that agerelated decline in these fundamental mechanisms has substantial implications for performance of many everyday activities, including survey responses, the use of technology, driving in unfamiliar environments, managing finances, managing medications, and making medical decisions (Park, 1997, in press).
