Everyday activities and cognitive functioning in adulthood

Many cognitive aging researchers are interested in the types of activities people do everyday and how engaging in different types of activities may help to maintain successful cognitive skills in old age.

Links to my research in this area:

• I created an activity questionnaire which has gone through a number of revisions. Soon I'll have a link here to the latest form of this activity questionnaire

• Here is the 1994 poster presentation about the initial set of data collected in California
• I presented data from a large sample of Canadian adults at the 8th Biennial Cognitive Aging Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, April 2000. Here's the abstract.

  You can select Table 1 to see the background information on the participants. Table 1 includes age ranges for the four age groups and group averages on the vocabulary, forward digit, and back digit tests from the WAIS.

  These participants were administered some cognitive tasks such as the digit symbol from the WAIS, a reasoning test, a fluency test, and the Boston Naming test.

  These same people also completed the 51 item activity questionnaire that aimed to measure a broad range of everyday activities that people engage in. All participants reported a broad variety of activities and activity levels. When looking at differences in the age groups, you can see minimal differences. Here are some graphs of the activity reports by age groups:
  (1) Physical Activity
  (2) Mental Activity
  (3) TV Viewing Activity

  Here is the short form of the results from the poster.

  Here is the short form of the summary from the poster.

  ...more to come...