Use of everyday memory strategies predicts subjective cognitive difficulties across the adult lifespan

The relationship between everyday cognitive strategy use and subjective cognition is unclear, but may be driven by an active, compensatory process in response to experiencing cognitive difficulties. However, the available evidence tends to focus on specific age groups, and on relationships with general cognition or memory performance only. We uniquely investigated the influence of age, cognitive strategy use, and their potential interaction, on the everyday cognitive difficulties of 606 United Kingdom-based adults aged 18-86. Participants completed self-report measures of everyday cognitive difficulties across specific domains (attention, visual-perceptual ability, verbal and visual-spatial memory, and language) and strategy use, both memory-specific and generalized (e.g. setting an alarm to help remember something or breaking down complex tasks). Age was negatively associated with frequency of strategy use, such that younger adults reported greater strategy use. Moderated regression models, with strategy use as a predictor of cognitive difficulty and age as the moderator, revealed that more frequent use of memory-specific cognitive strategies, rather than generalized strategy use, was the most robust, unique predictor of greater difficulties across the majority of cognitive domains. Importantly, there was no interaction between age and cognitive strategy use for any cognitive domain, highlighting that cognitive strategy use is pervasive across the adult lifespan, and is related to a range of subjective cognitive difficulties. The findings underscore the significant, apparently compensatory relationship between strategy use and subjective cognition. They also reveal scope for older adults to incorporate more frequent use of cognitive strategies in everyday life.