Cognitive Changes During the Adult Years: Implications for Developmental Theory and Research

Modifying the Questioning Strategies of Young Children and Elderly Adults with Strategy-Modeling Techniques

“…Contrary to previous suggestions {Denney and Connors, 1974;Denney and Wright, 1976), young children and elderly adults do not seem to differ much in their training needs. Young children seem to be able to learn from example provision alone and, in fact, on the first posttest even asked a larger percentage of constraint-seeking questions following the example provision training than the elderly adults who were given example provision training.…”

“…If, as has been suggested {Denney and Connors, 1974;Denney and Wright, 1976), the elderly adults already have the constraint-seeking strategy in their repertoires while the chil dren do not, then presumably it would be more difficult to teach young children to use the constraint-seeking strategy than it would to teach elderly adults to use it. However, the results of the present studies indicate that this is not the case.…”

“…However, a major difference between the problem-solving skills of young children and elderly adults may lie in their ability to generate the strategy rule. Elderly adults seem to be capable of abstracting this rule on their own from the examples of constraint-seeking questions that they hear during training {Denney and Wright, 1976). A similar ability may not exist within the problem-solving repertoire of the typical young child.…”

Current Status of Formal Operations Research

“…Schaie (1977Schaie ( /1978) offers a five-stage description: acquisitive, achieving, responsible, executive, and reintegrative, in which the final three stages apply to adulthood. Finally, there is the as-yet-unresolved question of possible intellectual regression in old age (Denney and Wright, 1976;Botwinick, 1977;Rabbit, 1977). Another reasonable focus for questions of generality concerns cross-cultural research.…”