Everyday cognition: age and intellectual ability correlates

Abstract

The primary aim of this study was to examine the relationship between a new battery of everyday cognition measures, which assessed 4 cognitive abilities within 3 familiar real-world domains, and traditional psychometric tests of the same basic cognitive abilities. Several theoreticians have argued that everyday cognition measures are somewhat distinct from traditional cognitive assessment approaches, and the authors investigated this assertion correlationally in the present study. The sample consisted of 174 community-dwelling older adults from the Detroit metropolitan area, who had an average age of 73 years. Major results of the study showed that (a) each everyday cognitive test was strongly correlated with the basic cognitive abilities; (b) several basic abilities, as well as measures of domain-specific knowledge, predicted everyday cognitive performance; and (c) everyday and basic measures were similarly related to age. The results suggest that everyday cognition is not unrelated to traditional measures, nor is it less sensitive to age-related differences.

Figure 1

A: Sample item from the Everyday Cognition Battery (ECB) Inductive Reasoning Test. B: Sample item from the ECB Knowledge Test. C: Sample item from the ECB Declarative Memory Test. D: Sample item from the ECB Working Memory Test.

Figure 2

Hypothesized ability-specific model (basic ability factors intercorrelated).

Figure 3

Final basic ability prediction model, Model 14 (basic ability factors intercorrelated).

Figure 4

Regression lines for African American (●) and White (○) participants for all cognitive variables and composite scores. Correlations equal to or greater than .26 and .18 are significant (p < .05) for the African American and White groups, respectively. ECB = Everyday Cognition Battery.