1. The Developing Person Through the Life Span
Adulthood:
Cognitive Development

2. What is Intelligence? General intelligence (g)
Intelligence is one basic trait that involves all cognitive abilities, which people possess in varying amounts.
Cannot be measured directly but inferred from various abilities
E.g. vocabulary, memory, and reasoning.
Many scientists are trying to find one common factor (genes, early brain development, or some specific aspect of health) that underlies IQ.

3. Research on Age and Intelligence
Cross-Sectional Research
U.S. Army: Tested aptitude of all literate draftees during World War I.
Intellectual ability peaked at about age 18, stayed at that level until the mid-20s, and then began to decline.
Classic study of 1,191 individuals, aged 10 to 60, from 19 New England villages.
IQ scores peaked between ages 18 and 21 and then gradually fell, with the average 55-year-old scoring the same as the average 14-year-old.

4. Research on Age and Intelligence
Longitudinal Research
Data found many intellectual gains through adulthood
Younger cohorts often better than older cohorts.
Probably due to changes in the environment (more education, improved nutrition, smaller family size, fewer infections) and NOT changes in innate intelligence
Better than cross-sectional research but also has problems
e.g. practice effects, high attrition rates.

5. Research on Age and Intelligence
Cross-Sequential Research
Combines both cross-sectional and longitudinal designs.
Seattle Longitudinal Study
Cross-sequential study of adult intelligence
Schaie began this study in 1956; the most recent testing was conducted in 2005.
500 adults, aged 20 to 50, were tested on five primary mental abilities.
New cohort was added and followed every 7 years.

6. Research on Age and Intelligence
Measures in the Seattle Longitudinal Study
Verbal meaning (comprehension)
Spatial orientation
Inductive reasoning
Number ability
Word fluency (rapid associations)
Findings
People improve in most mental abilities during adulthood and decline later in life.
Each ability has a distinct pattern for each gender.
The Seattle Longitudinal Study of Adult Intelligence
The Seattle Longitudinal Study of Adult Intelligence has followed a group of more than 5000 people for well over four decades. The program began in 1956 and participants have been tested across a whole gamut of mental and physical abilities at seven year intervals since that date.
The study has found:
no uniform pattern of age-related change across all intellectual abilities
some support for the idea that abilities that are primarily genetically determined tend to decline earlier than abilities that are primarily acquired through schooling or experience (although there may be gender differences here)
although abilities that are primarily genetic may decline earlier, abilities acquired through training decline more steeply after late 70s the change in perceptual speed begins in young adulthood and declines in a linear fashion (that is, the rate of decline is constant)
the rate and magnitude changes in intelligence seen in those entering old age showed greater decline in the 1st 3 cycles (till 1970); at the same time, younger members are scoring lower on tests at the same age.
a decline in psychometric abilities is not reliably observed before 60, but is reliably observed by 74. However, even by 81, fewer than half showed reliable decrements over the past seven years.
the size of this decline however is significantly reduced when age changes in perceptual speed are taken into account.
substantial cohort / generational differences have been observed. Later-born groups have attained successively higher scores at the same ages for inductive reasoning, verbal meaning, and spatial orientation; however, they’ve scored successively lower in number skill and word fluency (number skill peaked with the 1924 cohort). These changes presumably reflect educational changes.
substantial similarity between parents and their adult children and between siblings has been found for virtually all mental abilities and measures of flexibility (the exceptions are the attitude measure of social responsibility, and a measure of perceptual speed). The magnitude of similarity varied for different abilities, and was closer between parent & child than between siblings.
the following variables may reduce the risk of cognitive decline in old age:
absence of chronic diseases
a complex and intellectually stimulating environment
a flexible personality style at mid-life
high intellectual status of spouse
maintenance of high levels of perceptual processing speed
cognitive training studies suggested that the observed decline in many community-dwelling older people is probably a function of disuse and is often reversible. Some 2/3 of participants in a cognitive training program showed significant improvement, and 40% of those who had declined significantly were indeed returned to their earlier (pre-decline) level of cognitive functioning. These training gains were retained over seven years.
References:
Schaie, K. Warner The Seattle Longitudinal Studies of adult intelligence. In M. Powell Lawton & Timothy A. Salthouse (eds) Essential papers on the psychology of aging. NY: NY Univ Pr. Pp

7. The Seattle Longitudinal Study of Adult Intelligence
The following variables may reduce the risk of cognitive decline in old age:
absence of chronic diseases
a complex and intellectually stimulating environment
a flexible personality style at mid-life
high intellectual status of spouse
maintenance of high levels of perceptual processing speed

8. Research on Age and Intelligence

9. Components of Intelligence: Many and Varied
Two Clusters of Intelligence (Cattell)
Fluid intelligence
Those types of basic intelligence that make learning of all sorts quick and thorough.
Includes abilities such as working memory, abstract thought, and speed of thinking.
Crystallized intelligence
Those types of intellectual ability that reflect accumulated learning.
Vocabulary and general information are examples.

10. Components of Intelligence: Many and Varied
Three Forms of Intelligence: Sternberg
Analytic intelligence
Valuable in high school and college, as students are expected to remember and analyze various ideas.
Creative intelligence
Allows people to find a better match to their skills, values, or desires.
Practical intelligence
Useful as people age and need to manage their daily lives.

11. Age and Culture
Which kind of intelligence is valued depends on age and culture.
Analytic valued in high school and college, may be seen as absentminded
Creative valued when new challenges arise, in only some political systems
Practical valued during adulthood, useful in every society

12. Selective Gains and Losses
Selective optimization with compensation!
Theory that people try to maintain a balance in their lives by looking for the best way to compensate for physical and cognitive losses and to become more proficient in activities they can already do well
Paul and Margaret Baltes, 1990.
Selective Optimization With Compensation. Selective Optimization With Compensation is a strategy for improving health and wellbeing in older adults and a model for successful ageing. It is recommended that seniors select and optimize their best abilities and most intact functions while compensating for declines and losses.

13. Expert Cognition Selective expert Expertise
Someone who is notably more skilled and knowledgeable than the average person about whichever activities are personally meaningful.
Expertise
Guided by culture and context.
Experts are more skilled, proficient, and knowledgeable at a particular task than the average person, especially a novice who has not practiced that skill.
Experts do not necessarily have extraordinary intellectual ability.

14. Expert Cognition Intuitive Automatic
Experts rely on their past experiences and on immediate contexts; their actions are more intuitive and less stereotypic.
Novices follow formal procedures and rules.
Automatic
Automatic processing
Thinking that occurs without deliberate, conscious thought.
Experts process most tasks automatically, saving conscious thought for unfamiliar challenges.

15. Expert Cognition
Strategic (relating to the identification of long-term or overall aims and interests and the means of achieving them)
Experts have more and better strategies, especially when problems are unexpected.
Flexible
Experts are creative and curious, deliberately experimenting and enjoying the challenge when things do not go according to plan.

16. Expertise and Age
Essential requirement of expertise is time (10 years?) .
Circumstances, training, talent, ability, practice, and age affect expertise.
Expertise sometimes overcomes the effects of age.
Experienced adults often use selective optimization with compensation.

17. Family Skills
More women are working in jobs traditionally reserved for men.
Women’s work
Term formally used to denigrate domestic and caregiving tasks that women did
Has gained new respect.
The skill, flexibility, and strategies needed to raise a family are a manifestation of expertise.

18. Family Skills

19. The End