Presents several reconceptualizations of adult cognitive development and its relation to everyday problem solving. Argues that investigation of relations between adult cognitive development and everyday problem solving may be facilitated through causal modeling that includes task characteristics, social context, and personality and motivational…

Self-efficacy, or a person's perception of his/her own mastery of a skill, affects subsequent task performance and predictions of future performance. To examine older adults' metamemorial knowledge with respect to predicting their performance on everyday and laboratory memory tasks, 28 adults (22 females, 6 males), aged 58 to 80 years, completed a…

Although studies using recall tasks to measure memory typically report age-related declines in performance for older subjects, little is known about how these research results relate to performance in actual situations. A study was undertaken to determine whether years of experience in a domain of knowledge could compensate for age-related…