Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Several cognitive abilities are thought to decline with age; however, these abilities are rarely tested in isolation. Experimental tasks often place demands on attention which are external to the cognitive process of interest and age differences in the ability to respond to these demands can sometimes give the impression that a particular cognitive process declines with age, when it is actually preserved. In this talk, I will present a series of findings which highlight the confounding effect task demands have on our understanding of neurocognitive aging and ask, what are we really measuring - the task or cognition?