ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with some definitions such as strategy, distinctions such as strategies and heuristics, and considerations on a strategy approach to human cognition. It then looks at how psychologists distinguish a number of strategies both on the theoretical and empirical levels. The chapter describes a conceptual framework that is useful for studying strategic variations during aging. It focuses on data from domains as diverse as attention, memory, problem solving, reasoning, decision making, and language processing. This allows us to understand why in some studies, researchers have observed strategic variations during aging, while studies in other domains-or even studies from the same domains by the same researchers-have failed to find such strategic variations. Psychologists have two overarching goals: To describe behaviors as precisely and accurately as possible, and to explain them. To achieve these two fundamental goals, they carry out empirical studies. Data can be derived from direct observations and from laboratory experiments and quasi-experiments. These provide measures of behavior.
