The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of advanced age on self-reported internal and external memory strategy uses, and whether this effect can be predicted by executive functioning. A sample of 194 participants aged 21 to 80 divided into three age groups (21-40, 41-60, 61-80) completed the two strategy scales of the Metamemory in Adulthood (MIA) questionnaire, differentiating between internal and external everyday memory strategy uses, and three tests of executive functioning. The results showed that: (1) the use of external memory strategies increased with age, whereas use of internal memory strategy decreased; (2) executive functioning appeared to be related only to internal strategies, the participants who reported the greatest use of internal strategies having the highest executive level; and (3) executive functioning accounted for a sizeable proportion of the age-related variance in internal strategy use. These findings suggest that older adults preferentially use external memory strategies to cope with everyday memory impairment due to aging. They also support the view that the age-related decrease in the implementation of internal memory strategies can be explained by the executive hypothesis of cognitive aging. This result parallels those observed using objective laboratory memory strategy measures and then supports the validity of self-reported memory strategy questionnaire.

Young (20-30-year-old) and older (60-76-year-old) adults were tested on two measures of rhythmic performance. The first involved tapping at the subject's own preferred rate, a measure of so-called internal tempo. Over five sessions of testing, tapping rates were consistently and significantly slower on average in the older subjects than the younger ones, but rates were not relatively more variable in older subjects (i.e., coefficients of variation, standard deviation/mean, did not differ between the older and young people). In addition, both old and younger subjects performed on a synchronized-tapping and continuation task of the type used by Wing and Kristofferson (1973, Perception and Psychophysics, 14, 3-12). Target interresponse times were 300, 400, 500, 600, and 700 ms, and in all cases interresponse intervals produced by both the old and young adults matched the target times very closely. Wing and Kristofferson's analytical procedure was used to decompose tapping variance into that attributable to timing processes and that resulting from motor implementation of the timing signal. Both sorts of variance increased with increasing target interresponse time (with timer variance increasing most markedly), but no difference was found in either type of variance in comparisons between the old and younger subjects. If the internal tempo measure directly reflects the speed of internal timing processes, the data suggest that such processes are slower, but not relatively more variable, in older than younger subjects (consistent with some previous evidence and speculation), but that the calibration of performance forced by the synchronization task will make such an age-related difference in "internal clock speed" unobservable on synchronized-tapping tasks.