ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses whether young and older adults differ in their strategy execution, and if so, to what extent and under what conditions. It looks at findings on change in strategy execution during aging from studies where participants themselves choose what strategy to use on each item. The chapter focuses on the findings from studies that take some biases in strategy selection into account. It examines factors that can influence differences in strategy execution between young and older adults: The characteristics of problems, situations, strategies, and sequences of strategies. The older adult's strategy execution seems to be more affected by sequential effects than that of young adults, as increased strategy switch costs and the sequential modulations of the poorer-strategy effect show. Research in the psychology of aging has shown that, in many cognitive domains, aging is accompanied by change in how a given strategy is executed.
