The ability to generate, plan for, and follow through with goals is essential to everyday functioning. Compared to young adults, cognitively normal older adults have more difficulty on a variety of cognitive functions that contribute to goal setting and follow through. However, how these age-related cognitive differences impact real-world goal planning and success remains unclear. In the current study, we aimed to better understand the impact of older age on everyday goal planning and success.

Cognitively normal young adults (18-35 years, n= 57) and older adults (60-80 years, n= 49) participated in a 10-day 2-session study. In the first session, participants described 4 real-world goals that they hoped to pursue in the next 10 days. These goals were subjectively rated for personal significance, significance to others, and vividness, and goal descriptions were objectively scored for temporal, spatial, and event specificity, among other measures. Ten days later, participants rated the degree to which they planned for and made progress in their real-world goals since session one. Older adults also completed a battery of neuropsychological tests.

Some key results are as follows. Relative to the young adults, cognitively normal older adults described real-world goals which navigated smaller spaces (p=0.01) and that they perceived as more important to other people (p=0.03). Older adults also planned more during the 10-day window (p<0.001). There was not a statistically significant age group difference, however, in real-world goal progress (p=0.65). Nonetheless, among older participants, goal progress was related to higher mental processing speed as shown by the Trail Making Test Part A (r=0.36, p=0.02) and the creation of goals confined to specific temporal periods (r=0.35, p=0.01). Older participants who scored lower on the Rey Complex Figure Test (RCFT) long delay recall trial reported that their goals were more like ones that they had set in the past (r= -0.34, p=0.02), and higher episodic memory as shown by the RCFT was associated with more spatially specific goals (r=0.32, p=0.02), as well as a greater use of implementation intentions in goal descriptions(r=0.35, p=0.02).

Although older adults tend to show decline in several cognitive domains relevant to goal setting, we found that cognitively normal older adults did not make significantly less progress toward a series of real-world goals over a 10-day window. However, relative to young adults, older adults tended to pursue goals which were more important to others, as well as goals that involved navigating smaller spaces. Older adults also appear to rely on planning more than young adults to make progress toward their goals. These findings reveal age group differences in the quality of goals and individual differences in goal success among older adults. They are also in line with prior research suggesting that cognitive aging effects may be more subtle in real-world contexts.