Successful aging is a multidimensional construct that has been used by a variety of clinical and empirical disciplines to describe physical and psychological well-being among the elderly. While biomedical models of successful aging rely on fixed criteria related to health and disability status, psychological models emphasize dynamic processes that promote life satisfaction in the face of age-related declines. Psychological models have proposed individual traits that are associated with successful aging processes, including those related to coping with, adapting to, and compensating for age-related challenges (e.g., tenacious goal pursuit, flexibility, etc.). Grit is a noncognitive trait that may promote coping and compensation but has been relatively unexamined in relation to successful aging. The ability to adapt to age-related losses, such as physical disability and cognitive decline, may represent a previously unexplored facet of grit that is specific to older adults. Preserved cognitive functioning is an important component of successful aging that may be promoted by grit and the use of compensatory strategies. In the context of atypical cognitive decline, however, grit may fail to promote effective compensation and may instead result in the use of unsuccessful strategies or “costly perseverance.”

Discussions of age differences in attention often start with the heuristic that older adults show reductions in top-down, goal-driven controlled attention compared to young adults, but relatively preserved bottom-up, stimulus-driven, and more automatic attentional functions. However, age differences in sensorimotor function can reduce the bottom-up salience of environmental stimuli. This can in turn lead to seemingly paradoxical findings of larger age-related deficits in very simple tasks that rely almost entirely on bottom-up attention than those that make moderate, but still-achievable, demands on top-down attention, and thus present opportunities for compensation. We suggest that just as attention represents the interplay of sensory and cognitive function, some of the most interesting and important age differences in attention occur at the interplay of top-down and bottom-up processes. New directions for the field include an increasing emphasis on the additional interplay between cognitive and motivational processes, and their physiological basis.

Emotional experiences are often more likely than neutral experiences to be remembered, or to be retrieved richly. In this chapter, we provide an overview of how the effects of emotion arise, emphasizing the effects that operate during the initial experience of the event (encoding), the storage and stabilization of the memory trace for that experience (consolidation), and the accessing of that trace (retrieval). We discuss how these effects of emotion can explain both why emotion enhances many aspects of memory throughout the adult life span and also why there are often age-by-valence interactions in memory, with older adults remembering information more positively than younger adults.

Cognition changes with age, and the amount and trajectory of change varies across individuals and functions. In this review, we argue that three general principles characterize adult life-span changes in brain and cognition. (1) Dimensionality: Many features of brain and cognition in aging and neurodegenerative disease represent quantitative differences along a continuum and are not unique to pathology. (2) Early influences – developmental origins of health and disease: Genetic dispositions and early environmental factors, likely even from fetal life, can have lasting impact on the brain and cognition. (3) Influences from a multitude of environmental factors: Current brain state and cognitive function will be determined by a combination of early factors and later environmental influences, often in interaction. These principles entail a model of age-associated cognitive decline and dementia based on dimensions rather than categories, life span rather than aging, and multidimensional systems-vulnerability rather than one major “biomarker.”

Decades of research have demonstrated that normal aging accompanies cognitive change. Much of this change has been conceptualized as a decline in function. However, age-related changes are not universal. Oft-found decrements in older adult performance may be moderated by experience, genetics, and environmental factors. To date, cognitive aging has largely emphasized biological changes in the brain, with less evaluation of the range of external contributors to behavioral manifestations of age-related decrements in performance. The goal of this book is to examine cognitive aging through the lens of a life course perspective. Understanding cognition within the context of both the life span (aging) and the life course (experience) is a relatively new approach to the field of cognitive aging. However, the approach has already pushed the field forward in theoretically and practically important ways.

Traditional perspectives on the study of aging and cognition have focused on what has been characterized as “cold cognition.” However, recent theoretical and empirical advances have emphasized the need to examine age differences in the factors that energize and direct cognitive activity (i.e., “hot cognition”). In the present chapter, the roles of goals and motivation are considered in terms of both explaining age differences in performance and characterizing adaptive functioning in later life. As an illustration of goal influences, three different perspectives associated with normative changes in goals across adulthood – social cognitive goals, socioemotional goals, and goal priorities – are discussed, along with their impact on cognition. The impact of aging on motivational processes associated with energizing, directing, and sustaining actions directed toward achieving goals is then considered, using selective engagement as an organizational framework.

Aging is marked by cognitive decline, which in the case of Alzheimer’s disease is associated with tremendous global economic burden. Identifying modifiable risk factors for cognitive decline is therefore of paramount importance. In this chapter, we describe how aging compromises sleep quality and sleep architecture at a rate that parallels normal age-related cognitive decline. We argue that understanding the neurocognitive functions of sleep – frontal lobe restoration, memory consolidation, and metabolite clearance – and how such functions change in later life will be key to informing why some older individuals maintain healthy cognitive functioning and other older individuals do not. Critically, by investigating how sleep, cognition, and aging interact, researchers and clinicians can develop sleep-related treatments that target preventing, or at least ameliorating, pathologies such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Healthy older adults typically retain high functioning in the social realm. Nevertheless, social networks, social support, and qualities of relationships vary in late life. This chapter addresses three questions: (1) What areas of cognitive functioning are associated with the social realm? (2) What mechanisms account for these associations? (3) Do these patterns extend to pathological declines associated with dementia? Individuals with a diversity of social partners retain general cognitive functioning more so than individuals with a limited set of social partners. Social integration provides stimulation and activities, and mitigates negative emotion in ways that contribute to cognitive health. Findings suggest that social ties cannot deter pathological declines associated with dementia. In sum, a wide range of social partners appears to be one of multiple resources (e.g., higher socioeconomic status, better locus of control, better health behaviors) that help maintain cognitive functioning in late life.

Sense of control over one’s life declines in the later portion of the life span, which is not surprising in the face of increased losses and decreased gains associated with aging. Unfortunately, the maintenance of sense of control is a key indicator of successful aging while low control beliefs are a risk factor for poor aging-related outcomes, such as lower concurrent and subsequent cognitive functioning. The simultaneous focus on the person and the environment is an important characteristic of research on control beliefs. We synthesize the state of the field and discuss the current understanding of the complex interplay of control beliefs and cognition. In addition, we propose that awareness of aging, which is the subjective interpretation of aging, may be an important future direction to elucidate the control-cognition relationships.

In this chapter, we provide an overview of how a strategy perspective fruitfully contributes to our understanding of aging effects on cognitive functioning and brain activations. We review previous research showing that people use a wide variety of strategies to accomplish cognitive tasks and how strategy use evolves during aging. Although strategic variations are modulated by individual differences and experimental conditions, older adults have been found to use fewer strategies, to use the more demanding strategies less often, to select the most appropriate strategy on each problem less often, and to be less efficient when executing a given strategy than young adults. Adopting a strategy approach enables better characterization of age-related changes observed in brain activations during task completion and contributes to specify the mechanistic and functional significance of age-related changes in neural recruitments. Finally, we review recent evidence suggesting that cognitive control processes underlie age-related changes in strategy use.

Although aging is associated with declines in domains such as physical health and cognitive abilities, a large body of research has provided evidence that older adults still report feeling positive. Prominent theories of emotional aging have suggested that this may be the result of increased emotion regulation abilities with age. Older adults are thought to choose and be more successful at certain strategies compared to younger adults. However, empirical evidence has not consistently supported all of the theoretical predictions. In this chapter, we discuss these predictions and how they relate specifically to aspects of cognitive aging. We will then discuss the evidence that both supports and refutes the claims made by these theories. Finally, we will attempt to reconcile the empirical findings with the theories to evaluate whether what we are seeing is actually age-related improvements, or evidence for stability and maintenance of emotional experience with age.

Inhibitory theory proposes three major functions that are required to control overactivation in response to cues in the environment and thought. Evidence suggests that each function, Access, Deletion, and Restraint, is reduced in efficiency in healthy older adults. These reductions can together account for slowing, reduced working memory capacity, and increased susceptibility to interference at retrieval – all memory phenomena associated with aging. These reductions also result in greater knowledge of the context in which events occur as well as in greater usage of that information. Opportunities for positive interventions tied to these inefficiencies are also noted.

Strong evidence suggests that older adults at risk of cognitive decline benefit from healthy lifestyle strategies to prevent or delay cognitive disorders. In particular, nutrition has been shown to preserve cognitive functions. Nutritional interventions, whether with single nutrients or following dietary patterns, have all shown protective effects against cognitive decline. In particular, higher levels of vitamins C, D, E, K, and the B family were associated with a better cognitive status. Likewise, fruit and vegetable consumption and omega-3 intake were protective against declined cognition. Regarding dietary patterns, the Mediterranean-type diet, DASH, and MIND diets are all positively associated with slower rates of cognitive decline and decreased risk of incident Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Nevertheless, intervention trials with vitamins or omega-3 supplements have not demonstrated conclusive evidence for preventing cognitive decline in healthy older adults, or for preventing loss or restoring function in patients with mild to moderate decline. Nutritional recommendations for older adults should emphasize dietary intakes of nutrients and food groups following those recommendations, as well as adoption of the Mediterranean, DASH, or MIND diets, in order to decrease risk of cognitive decline.

Physical and cognitive abilities are important for safe and successful participation in daily life, and much research has been done on how to preserve function in both kinds of ability throughout the aging process. Over the past twenty years these concepts were mostly studied separately; more recent research has led to new paradigms focused on the overlap in those brain mechanisms responsible for impairments in both mobility and cognition. A deeper understanding of this overlap could result in better interventions for maintaining the cognitive and physical health of older adults and a more comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding these complex, often integrated functions. This chapter (1) defines and describes cognitive and motor changes as part of the aging process, with a focus on individuals with dementia and mild cognitive impairment, (2) identifies methodologies used to understand the interrelationship between cognition and mobility, (3) describes what has been observed about this interrelationship, and (4) discusses research to date on potential interventions with suggestions for future interdisciplinary research.