DEPRESSION, AGING, AND PSYCHOLOGICAL THREAT - THE SAME OR DIFFERENT MECHANISMS OF COGNITIVE IMPAIRMENTS?

Explanations of the cognitive difficulties of depression, aging, and stereotype threat often make use of similar theoretical concepts from the basic cognition literature, however contributors to those literatures do not often communicate directly with one another. Progress in this direction requires that we construct task paradigms to measure theoretically postulated cognitive mechanisms. Comparison across different group contrasts on the same task will eventually allow us to compare the profiles of selective impairments in cognitive functions of various groups relative to a control group. The research described in this chapter represents one attempt to tackle that problem, using the linear order paradigm. This paradigm enables to examine the maintenance function of working memory and to compare the participants on generative reasoning task that require them to integrate piecemeal information into a coherent mental model. We demonstrated that both depressed students and students threatened by negative stereotype have problems with generative reasoning. However, older participants, although having their reasoning ability preserved, suffered from serious problems of preserving important input information in memory during processing. To conclude, low performance in linear order reasoning across different populations reflects clearly different impairments: more basic cognitive dysfunction of memory maintenance in older age and integration deficits in depression and in stereotype threat condition.