Remediating Cognitive Decline with Cognitive Tutors

2019

Conference Paper

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As people age, their cognitive abilities tend to deteriorate, including their ability to make complex plans. To remediate this cognitive decline, many commercial brain training programs target basic cognitive capacities, such as working memory. We have recently developed an alternative approach: intelligent tutors that teach people cognitive strategies for making the best possible use of their limited cognitive resources. Here, we apply this approach to improve older adults' planning skills. In a process-tracing experiment we found that the decline in planning performance may be partly because older adults use less effective planning strategies. We also found that, with practice, both older and younger adults learned more effective planning strategies from experience. But despite these gains there was still room for improvement-especially for older people. In a second experiment, we let older and younger adults train their planning skills with an intelligent cognitive tutor that teaches optimal planning strategies via metacognitive feedback. We found that practicing planning with this intelligent tutor allowed older adults to catch up to their younger counterparts. These findings suggest that intelligent tutors that teach clever cognitive strategies can help aging decision-makers stay sharp.

@conference{Das2019RLDM,
  title = {Remediating Cognitive Decline with Cognitive Tutors},
  author = {Das, Priyam and Callaway, Fred and Griffiths, Thomas L. and Lieder, Falk},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.13140/RG.2.2.36052.45443}
}