The Influence of Older Age, Individual Differences in Cognitive Abilities, and State of Mind on Learning Novel Categories

Objectives: Category learning involves learning to group items based on their common features,and it is a key ability that allows us to acquire new concepts and skills throughout our lives. Yet,we know little about the factors that facilitate category learning and how those might differ inolder age. Here, we test the relationship between categorization performance and individualdifferences in a variety of cognitive abilities and aspects of state of mind and how thoserelationships differ in older age.Method: Seventy-six young adults (18-29 years old) and 73 older adults (60-83 years old)underwent a cognitive assessment testing processing speed, working memory, verbalcomprehension, and perceptual reasoning. Two experimental sessions followed whereparticipants completed a categorization task and state of mind questionnaires assessing stress,motivation, mood, and sleep.Results: Overall IQ, verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning, and processing speed weresignificant positive predictors of categorization performance across age groups. Negative affectand sleepiness were significant negative predictors of categorization performance, with asignificant age moderation effect for sleepiness: sleepiness had less of a negative impact on olderadults’ categorization performance than on young adults’.Discussion: We show that lower baseline cognitive abilities, negative mood, and sleepinessworsen categorization performance regardless of age. We also show that older adults are lessaffected by sleepiness compared to young adults. Thus, most predictors of the ability to learnnew categories were age invariant, but we find some evidence that older adults are more resilientthan young adults to negative aspects of state of mind.