Professional competences to promote healthy ageing across the lifespan: a scoping review

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Strategy selection in Alzheimer patients: A study in arithmetic

International audienceObjective: We compared Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients' and elderly controls' abilities to select the best strategy on each item and determined whether AD patients tended to repeat the same strategy across consecutive items more often than controls. Method: A total of 60 participants (30 healthy older adults, HOA; 30 AD patients) were asked to select the best rounding strategy to estimate products of multiplication problems (e.g., estimating 42 x 76 by rounding operands down or up, like doing 40 x 70 = 2800 or 50 x 80 = 3200). We identified strategies used on each problem and measured solution latencies and percentage errors with each strategy as a function of problem characteristics. Results: Older adults and AD patients were able to use both available strategies. However, AD patients were less able to select the best strategy than HOA, especially on problems for which selecting the best strategy was most difficult. Moreover, AD patients significantly repeated the preceding strategies across successive problems more often than HOA. Conclusions: Our findings have important implications for further our understanding of dementia-related differences in strategic aspects of cognitive performance

Strategy Repetition in Young and Older Adults: A Study in Arithmetic

International audienceWe investigated a new phenomenon that sheds light on age-related differences in strategy selection: the strategy repetition phenomenon (i.e., tendency to repeat the same strategy over consecutive items). Young and older adults had to provide the best estimates of multiplication problems like 47 x 86. They had to select the best of 2 rounding strategies on each problem, the rounding-down strategy (i.e., doing 40 x 80 = 3,200) or the rounding-up strategy (i.e., doing 50 x 90 = 4,500). Data showed that both young and older adults repeated the same strategy over consecutive problems more often than chance and repeated strategies more often in the 2-prime condition (i.e., after executing one strategy to solve the 2 immediately preceding problems) than in the 1-prime condition (i.e., after executing a strategy on one immediately preceding problem). Moreover, this strategy repetition phenomenon increased with age, especially in the most difficult condition (e.g., when participants solved rounding-up problems in the 2-prime condition). Our findings have important theoretical and empirical implications for computational models of strategy selection and for furthering our understanding of strategic development during adulthood

Professional competences to promote healthy ageing across the lifespan: a scoping review

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