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The study of aging and cognitive skill learning is concerned with age-related changes and differences in how we gather, store, and use information and abilities. As life expectancy continues to rise, resulting in greater numbers and proportions of older individuals in the population, understanding the development and retention of skills across the lifespan is increasingly important. Older adults’ task performance in cognitive skill learning is often equal to that of young adults, albeit not as efficient, where older adults often require more time to complete training. Investigations of age differences in fundamental cognitive processes of attention, memory, or executive functioning generally reveal declines in older adults. These are related to a slowing of cognitive processing. Slowing in cognitive processing results in longer time necessary to complete tasks which can interfere with the fidelity of older adults’ cognitive processes in time-limited scenarios. Despite this, older adults maintain comparable rates of learning with young adults, albeit with some reduced efficiency in more complex tasks. The effectiveness of older adults’ learning is also impacted by a lesser tendency to recognize and adopt efficient learning strategies, as well as less flexibility in strategy use relative to younger adults. In learning tasks that involve a transition from using a complex initial strategy to relying on memory retrieval, older adults show a volitional avoidance of memory that is related to lower memory confidence and an impoverished mental model of the task. Declines in learning are not entirely problematic from a functional perspective, however, as older adults can often rely upon their extensive knowledge to compensate for certain deficiencies, particularly in everyday tasks. Indeed, domains where older adults have maintained expertise are somewhat insulated from other age-related declines.

Hindsight bias describes the tendency of persons—after the outcome of an event is known—to overestimate their foresight. For example, following a political election, persons tend to retrospectively adjust their predictions to the actual outcome. These judgment distortions are very robust and have been observed in a variety of domains and tasks. About 50 years of research on hindsight bias have meanwhile brought a wealth of findings and insights. Core research questions are (1) how to explain hindsight bias in terms of underlying processes, (2) whether there are individual differences in susceptibility, (3) how the bias possibly impedes decision-making in applied contexts, such as political decision-making, and (4) how possibly to overcome it. Theoretical approaches suggest that there are distinct components of hindsight bias, and that several, mainly cognitive, mechanisms are responsible for them. Using stochastic models of hindsight bias allows us to estimate the relative proportions of these mechanisms. Depending on the task, motivational factors may also exert their influence. In addition, the strength of hindsight bias appears to be related to some personality traits and also to age. For example, some authors found that hindsight bias tends to increase with the tendency toward favorable self-presentation and to decrease with intelligence. Moreover, lifespan studies have shown that children and older adults show larger hindsight bias than young adults. Hindsight bias has been found in political decision-making (as well as in other applied domains). Surprisingly, attempts to overcome hindsight bias have mainly failed, whereas only a few debiasing techniques show promising results. In sum, one important conclusion is to be continuously aware of the potentially distorting influence of outcome knowledge on the evaluation of our own (or other’s) prior knowledge state.

Cognitive processing of social and nonsocial information changes with age. These processes range from the ones that serve “mere” cognitive functions, such as recall strategies and reasoning, to those that serve functions that pertain to self-regulation and relating to others. However, aging and the development of social cognition unfold in different cultural contexts, which may assume distinct social norms and values. Thus, the resulting age-related differences in cognitive and social cognitive processes may differ across cultures. On the one hand, biological aging could render age-related differences in social cognition universal; on the other hand, culture may play a role in shaping some age-related differences. Indeed, many aspects of cognition and social cognition showed different age and culture interactions, and this makes the study of these phenomena more complex. Future aging research on social cognition should take cultural influences into consideration.

There are two main branches of the human stress response. The autonomic nervous system acts rapidly and is often referred to as our fight or flight response. The slow-acting arm of the stress response refers to the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which triggers a hormone cascade resulting in the release of various hormones including cortisol. Healthy functioning of the HPA axis is tightly regulated by negative feedback, the endogenous self-regulatory mechanism of the system that terminates cortisol production. Alterations in HPA axis functioning are characterized by both hypo- and hypersecretion of cortisol in response to psychological stress and are typically associated with negative physical health outcomes as well as clinical pathology. What remains poorly understood is how HPA activity changes with age and the pathways through which these changes occur. In addition to changes associated with the normative aging process, age-related changes in cortisol may also be driven by the cumulative effects of stress experienced across the life span (e.g., traumatic stress); stressors unique to later life (e.g., caring for an ailing loved one); or health problems. Although research examining how the HPA axis might change with age is inconsistent, there appears to be reasonable evidence to suggest that: (1) both stress-induced and diurnal cortisol output may increase with age, potentially beginning with changes in the cortisol awakening response, (2) variability in cortisol production increases with age, (3) diurnal (i.e., daily) cortisol rhythms are preserved in later life, and (4) age-related differences in cortisol may be more distinct in men than in women. However, it remains unknown whether these changes in older adults’ physiology reflect maladaptive functioning of the HPA axis or interact with other health concerns to negatively affect overall psychophysiological health. Further research is needed to disentangle the interplay between aging and HPA axis functioning to better understand what alterations are associated with the normative aging process, when they occur, and how they influence longevity.