Older adults have diminished awareness of errors in the laboratory and daily life

Abstract

Poor recognition of the degree or scope of one's own cognitive deficits is a common feature of many neurological conditions, including diseases of aging, but little is known about the impact the natural aging process has on this aspect of self-awareness (SA). Here, a group of 45 healthy older adults and a comparison group of 45 young adults completed a multidomain assessment of SA. Awareness of daily functioning was evaluated based on discrepancies between self- and informant ratings on questionnaire measures of attentional control, memory functioning, and socioemotional functioning. Online error awareness was also assessed using a variant of the Go/No-Go Error Awareness Task (EAT) in which ..