Abstract
This study investigated the availability of deductive reasoning competence in late adulthood. Forty-six Japanese older (mean age =71 years) and 58 Japanese young adults (mean age =19.6 years) were assessed for formal or deductive reasoning using Overton's (1990) revision of the four-card selection task. For older adults, metacognitive strategy—operating as a procedure designed to access reasoning competence—resulted in enhanced performance levels. When the semantic content of the reasoning task involved emotional issues, however, the metacognitive strategy failed to facilitate reasoning performance. This suggests that reasoning competence is available in late adulthood but that performance is susceptible to contextual variables. Social factors were not significantly related to older adults' reasoning performance. Thus, assessment of these factors may have been based on too broad a definition to describe adequately the status of the older adults. For the young, only semantic task content was related to reasoning performance.
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Takahashi, M., Overton, W.F. Formal reasoning in Japanese older adults: The role of metacognitive strategy, task content, and social factors. J Adult Dev 3, 81–91 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02278774
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02278774