ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a variety of findings related to whether aging leads to changes in strategy distributions. It examines that the strategy distributions of young and older adults sometimes differ such that young and older adult's mean percentages of use of particular strategies for a given task or within a given cognitive domain are often not the same. Work on age-related differences in strategy distributions in different cognitive domains offers important insights on the conditions required to maximize the chances of observing such differences, when they exist. This type of research has shown that studies intended to uncover effects of aging on strategy distributions must: choose a task that allows for the use of multiple strategies, so that strategy variability can emerge and be analyzed; use a large enough number of items to study intra-individual strategy variability; and assess the strategy used, whenever possible, either directly, or else indirectly.
