Abstract
This chapter reviews how cognitive aging impacts social processes, including consideration of both interpersonal and cultural factors. Cognition, including memory, may be more preserved when information is relevant to the self or in interpersonally meaningful situations. This chapter approaches motivated cognition by first reviewing findings about how self-referencing, relating information to the self, serves as an effective encoding strategy and also considers how the strategy engages neural regions in younger and older adults. It then considers how emotionally meaningful interactions with others continue to be important with age and may help to evoke effective information processing. The chapter closes by considering how culture may contribute to cognition and how cultural groups might exhibit the effects of cognitive aging in different ways, depending on task demands and relevant strategies.
