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Received Nov 18, 2017; Revised Feb 18, 2018; Accepted Mar 22, 2018
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1. Introduction
Generally, physical activity adherence is examined by social psychologists and health psychologists to prevent sedentariness. Reviews of the gerontological literature on this topic reveal a number of socioeconomic, demographic, psychological, attitudinal, and accessibility correlates and/or determinants of physical activity (PA) [1–5]. For instance, when focusing on independently living elderly people, van Stralen et al. [2] and Koeneman et al. [3] reported several moderate to strong determinants of regular PA such as age, gender, education, perceived health and depression, baseline PA behavior, barriers’ self-efficacy, benefits of regular PA, and social support. However, adherence also requires continuous effort and strategies underpinned by executive functions to maintain the behaviors involved in the healthy management of day-to-day living such as PA [6], diet regimen, and medication [7].
It is now well known that cognitive functions undergo a decline during aging [8], and this decline is often associated with the use of compensatory cognitive strategies that could help aging people cope with their diminished cognitive performances. For instance, some elderly people use external memory strategies, such as writing a shopping list on a piece of paper to compensate for a decline in episodic memory. In some cases, these strategies can be considered counterproductive in a long-term perspective because external memory aids could stimulate negative stereotype related to aging by reducing perceived efficacy and perceived control on memory [9]. These strategies could lead the individual to reduce the cognitive resources used to initiate behaviors and, consequently, not to stimulate or maintain their self-regulation ability. Thus, each time an elderly person chooses to write his/her shopping list on a piece of paper to avoid forgetting an item during shopping, he/she does not stimulate his/her encoding and retrieval memory systems and consequently undermines his/her episodic memory in the long term. Fortunately, not all compensatory cognitive strategies reduce the cognitive resources invested to cope with a problem but rather use alternate or vicarious cognitive systems, for instance, internal memory strategies [10]. In another respect, Lachman and Andreoletti [11] reported that...