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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Succesful aging
— the role of cognitive gerontology | | Author(s) | Alan Hartley, Lucie Angel, Alan Castel |
| Journal title | Experimental Aging Research, vol 44, no 1, January-February 2018 |
| Publisher | Taylor and Francis, January-February 2018 |
| Pages | pp 82-93 |
| Source | http://www.tandfonline.com |
| Keywords | Mental health [elderly] ; Cognitive processes ; Memory and Reminiscence ; Mental ageing ; Ageing process. |
| Annotation | This commentary explores the relationships between the construct of successful ageing and the experimental psychology of human ageing_cognitive gerontology. What can or should cognitive gerontology contribute to understanding, defining and assessing successful ageing? Standards for successful ageing reflect value judgments that are culturally and historically situated. Fundamentally, they address social policy; they are prescriptive. If individuals or groups are deemed to be ageing successfully, then their characteristics or situations can be emulated. If an individual or a group is deemed to be ageing unsuccessfully, then intervention should be considered. Although science is never culture-free or ahistorical, cognitive gerontology is primarily descriptive of age-related change. It is not prescriptive. It is argued that cognitive gerontology has little to contribute to setting standards for successful ageing. If, however, better cognitive function is taken as a marker of more successful ageing _ something not universally accepted _ then cognitive gerontology can play an important assessment role. It has a great deal to contribute in determining whether an individual or a group evidences better cognitive function than another. More importantly, cognitive gerontology can provide tools to evaluate the effects of interventions. It can provide targeted measures of perception, attention, memory, executive function and other facets of cognition that are more sensitive to change than most clinical measures. From a deep understanding of factors affecting cognitive function, cognitive gerontology can also suggest possible interventions. This article was the result of an international conference on Cognitive Psychology and the Challenges of Successful Aging organised by the authors, sponsored by the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation, and held at the Domaine de la Bretesche, Missillac, Loire-Atlantique, France in June 2015. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-180302213 A |
| Classmark | D: DA: DB: D6: BG |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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