Everyday cognition: age and intellectual ability correlates

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.