ABSTRACT

Research on aging has been focused mainly on how various cognitive functions decline with aging. However, the decline or damage can not explain the complex picture of cognitive changes in later life.Older adults seem to perform very well in certain tasks, and even to show better performance thanyounger adults. Recent cognitive control model, including emotion and motivation, can explain theinconsistent effects of aging. People used to consume a reasonable level of cognitive resources, and itseems that older adults preserve the ability to adjust the level of consumption to the optimal level inregards to their emotion and motivation. As people are getting older, they put more value on certainattributes of information that is emotionally charged, and this will, in turn, change the strategy of theallocation of cognitive resources to perform well on a given task by the old people. One of the reasonswhy aging research can not fully explain the asymmetric results of cognitive aging would be attributed tothe fact that the usage of value-free (emotionally neutral) stimuli in laboratory settings is not quitesensitive enough to delineate the difference in strategy changes between young and old adults. Knowingthat people deal their daily activities with emotionally valued information, it should be adopted a newframework that puts a high priority on emotion and motivation in cognitive aging research.