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Cognitive Processes in Adulthood

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Whatever intelligence tests measure: 'IQ' Thurstone: seven primary mental abilities ... Cattell & Horn: two 'competencies' Fluid Intelligence: flexible reasoning ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Cognitive Processes in Adulthood


1
Cognitive Processes in Adulthood
2
Perspectives
  • Organismic Piaget
  • formal operations abstractions
  • Post-formal operations
  • Problem finding
  • Dialectical reasoning
  • Mechanistic Social learning
  • Contextual Vygotsky interactions
  • Psychometric intelligence

3
Intelligence
  • What is it?
  • inherited and acquired
  • no general definition
  • Intelligent Behaviour
  • goal-oriented (conscious, deliberate)
  • adaptive (problem solving)

4
Multidimensional
  • Diverse
  • Cattells g
  • Whatever intelligence tests measure IQ
  • Thurstone seven primary mental abilities
  • Sternberg cognitive approach
  • analytic (academic)
  • practical (problem solving)
  • creative

5
Cattell Horn two competencies
  • Fluid Intelligence flexible reasoning
  • Basic mental abilities
  • E.g., abstract thinking, speed of thinking,
    problem solving
  • Crystallized intelligence facts
  • Information acquired from education and experience

6
Gardner multiple intelligences
  • Logical/math
  • Linguistic
  • Visual/spatial
  • Musical
  • Body/kinesthetic
  • Interpersonal
  • Intrapersonal

7
Intelligence and Aging
  • Stereotype
  • intellectual activity peaks at 18-19 years
  • declines steadily with age

8
Developmental Research Shows
  • most intellectual abilities stable throughout
    early and middle adulthood
  • cohort differences powerful influence on
    intelligence differences
  • many factors affect intellectual functioning
    education, health, mental well-being

9
Growth, Stability, or Decline?
  • Decrementalist vs.
  • Continued Potential views

10
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11
Psychometric Perspective
  • Focus on
  • measuring the mind
  • individual differences
  • description, not explanation

12
Intelligence Testing
  • Francis Galton
  • Cattell, Binet
  • Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scales

13
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14
  • Verbal (language, knowledge)
  • Performance (manipulate info. to solve problems)
  • Greater decline in performance than verbal tests
    over age

15
Fluid vs. Crystallized
  • Decline in fluid, stable/increase in crystallized

16
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17
Seattle Longitudinal Study (Warner Schaie, 1994)
  • 5,000 participants (representative)
  • Studied six times, at 7-year intervals
  • Several cohorts (21-71 years)
  • Began in 1956, latest testing in 1992

18
  • Charted course of 6 primary mental abilities
    (PMAT)
  • inductive reasoning
  • numeric ability
  • verbal ability
  • spatial orientation
  • verbal memory
  • perceptual speed

19
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20
Cross-Sectional Results
  • Much individual variability
  • Maintenance/increase to _at_ age 50
  • Decline in performance beyond 50 yrs.
  • Verbal memory best maintained
  • Perceptual speed most reduced

21
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22
Longitudinal Results
  • cohort differences
  • no change/increase in performance across age

23
  • Performance of total sample at each measurement
    interval
  • peak at midlife
  • increasing decline with age
  • Cohort Effects (over 28 years)
  • Break data down by birth date
  • Positive Cohort Trends
  • Later-born perform better than earlier-born (in
    general)

24
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25
General Conclusions about Age-Effects
  • Large individual differences in degree, rate, and
    pattern of change with age
  • Different aspects of intelligence follow
    different patterns of change with time (e.g.,
    crystallized vs. fluid intelligence)

26
  • Cohort trends show influence of socio-historical
    context on cognitive development
  • In healthy adults, cognitive decline is small, at
    least until very late adulthood
  • Trends support combination of decrement and
    continued-potential

27
Factors Influencing Intellectual Performance in
Later Life
  • Health
  • normal vs. superior health (Botwinick Birren,
    1963)
  • superior gt normal on WAIS
  • slight deviations from optimal health affect
    intelligence

28
  • Hypertension (Wilkie et al., 1971)
  • WAIS administered twice over 10 years (Time 1
    60-69 years)
  • Largest decline for those with high blood
    pressure at first testing

29
  • Sensory changes e.g., hearing Loss
  • correlates negatively with intelligence (e.g.,
    Baltes et al., 1997)
  • greater loss poorer performance (esp. on
    information, vocabulary tests)
  • Why?

30
  • Organic Brain Syndrome (institutionalized with
    dementia)
  • decline greater than in healthy

31
Education
  • (Birren Morrison, 1961)
  • Number of years correlated with intellectual
    performance in later life
  • General Intelligence related to years of
    education (50 of variance), and not strongly
    related to age (10 of variance)

32
Initial Level of Ability
  • No differential effects on rate of intellectual
    decline with age
  • Relative levels maintained across lifespan
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