In my talk I will discuss results and implications of published and unpublished studies on influence of aging on higher order cognitive processes like context reasoning. The first studies demonstrate that although aging and depression impaired transitive reasoning the mechanisms of these limitations are quite different. In the case of aging these deficits in reasoning might be derived from limitations in more basic cognitive processes like mental speed or working memory capacity, whereas in the case of depression there seem to be genuine constraints in integration of premises into more coherent mental structures like mental array. The next studies on transitive reasoning across adult life span (compared and young adults, middle-aged adults and older adults) show intriguing interactions between age and modal forms of reasoning. There were visual formal, visual narrative, and auditory narrative forms of presenting premises for transitive reasoning. The additional manipulation concerned the motivation to avoid cognitive closure, motivation to promote cognitive closure, and control group. Older adults showed the pattern of increasing accuracy for solving transitive problems from visual formal, by narrative text, to auditory narrative form while the young adults showed the exactly opposite pattern. Hence, there were striking differences between age groups in visual formal reasoning and the age group differences were diminished for the auditory narrative reasoning especially under the manipulation to avoid cognitive closure. In conclusion I will present more general implications (including applications for effective cognitive trainings among older adults) for the findings that older adults are especially efficient in extracting logical inferences from narrative materials.
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