Cognitive aging: is there a dark side to environmental support?

• Perceptual salience rather than attentional focus governs stimulus processing in old age.
• Older adults rely more on environmental prompts for action than younger adults do.
• Environmental support helps older adults to perform but results in loss of internal control.
• The structure of the environment matters, especially for older adults.

It has been known for some time that memory deficits among older adults increase when self-initiated processing is required and decrease when the environment provides task-appropriate cues. We propose that this observation is not confined to memory but can be subsumed under a more general developmental trend. In perception, learning or memory, and action management, older adults often rely more on external information than younger adults do, probably both as a direct reflection and indirect adaptation to difficulties in internally triggering and maintaining cognitive representations. This age-graded shift from internal towards environmental control is often associated with compromised performance. Cognitive aging research and the design of aging-friendly environments can benefit from paying closer attention to the developmental dynamics and implications of this shift.