Making Older Adults' Cognitive Health Visible After Covid-19 Outbreak

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges to humankind. Community-dwelling older adults are considered one of the most vulnerable profiles and their chronic conditions might be aggravated by the consequences of lockdown (Burrai et al., 2020; Cordellieri et al., 2021; Pongan et al., 2021). Innovative approaches, supported by evidence disaggregated by age but also gender and relevant socio-economic characteristics, are crucial to effective public policy making that is inclusive for them. According to the WHO Department of Gender (2002), gender is used to describe the characteristics of women and men that are socially constructed. While gender perspective in the measures taken to combat Covid-19 outbreak should ensure gender equity for community-dwelling older adults, training certain individual factors might be an opportunity to address, or at least slow down, the negative effects of the current health crisis. In this way, several recent findings suggest that targeting metacognition skills might play an important role not only on technology adoption, but also in anxiety (Tsumura and Robertson, 2017; Capobianco et al., 2020). From an exploratory perspective, we discuss the effects on other cognitive processes, such as visuospatial navigation, one of the skills that might have suffered most from the effects of the restriction measures during covid-19. The training of metacognitive awareness as a strategy might be of interest to address not only deficits underlying Cognitive Health, but also the gender gap described in previous literature, especially for older adults.