Golden retrievers: Older adults solve single-digit arithmetic via fact retrieval

Compensation accounts of cognitive aging propose that older adults may increasingly rely on preserved knowledge systems to offset declines in fluid or resource-demanding processes. As arithmetic skills are crucial for mastering everyday life up to old age, they present an opportunity to investigate whether older adults exhibit task-specific deficits besides general slowing. Older (≥60 years) and younger adults (18-34 years) solved single-digit arithmetic problems in a verbal production paradigm. Arithmetic performance and strategy use were assessed for all four basic arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division), varying in problem size (small vs. large). Older adults were slower than younger adults in all operations except multiplication. Older adults were able to preserve a similar problem-size effect, as they used fast retrieval strategies more often than younger adults to solve large single-digit problems (except for division). While older adults can retrieve arithmetic facts equally well as younger adults, they are slower when using procedural strategies. Overall, this study suggests that older adults rely on well-preserved factual knowledge and therefore can compensate for some of the age-related domain-general cognitive deficits. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).