When does cognitive functioning peak? The asynchronous rise and fall of different cognitive abilities across the lifespan

By Joshua K. Hartshorne, Laura T. Germine. Psychology Science, 2015

642 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Understanding how and when cognitive change occurs over the life span is a prerequisite for understanding normal and abnormal development and aging. Most studies of cognitive change are constrained, however, in their ability to detect subtle, but theoretically informative life-span changes, as they rely on either comparing broad age groups or sparse sampling across the age range. Here, we present convergent evidence from 48,537 online participants and a comprehensive analysis of normative data from standardized IQ and memory tests. Our results reveal considerable heterogeneity in when cognitive abilities peak: Some abilities peak and begin to decline around high school graduation; some abilities plateau in early adulthood, beginning to decline in subjects’ 30s; and still others do not peak until subjects reach their 40s or later. These findings motivate a nuanced theory of maturation and age-related decline, in which multiple, dissociable factors differentially affect different domains of cognition.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ba4472006bc082311f81a0de33381a5b1f068ee3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

1. Richard J. Haier
2. Josh H. McDermott
3. Ralph Adolphs
4. J. Wilmer
5. Patricia K. Kuhl
6. A. Kazdin
7. L. Young
8. Colin F. Camerer

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. Richard J. Haier
2. Ralph Adolphs
3. J. Dubois
4. J. Wilmer
5. Lynn K. Paul
6. Paola Galdi

In Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology

1. Richard J. Haier
2. J. Wilmer

Citations in the corpus

• Individual Differences in Face Recognition: A Decade of Discovery (2017, background): “…these studies suggest that face recognition does not fit straightforwardly into the traditional dichotomy between early-peaking fluid intelligence (with a peak around age 20 or earlier) and late-peaking crystallized intelligence (with a peak at or after age 50; Hartshorne & Germine, 2015).”
• Headphone screening to facilitate web-based auditory experiments (2017, background): “For example, some experiments require large numbers of participants (Kidd et al., 2007; McDermott et al., 2010; Hartshorne and Germine, 2015, Teki et al., 2016) and are much more efficiently conducted online, where hundreds of participants can be run per day.”
• The Neuroscience of Intelligence (2016, background): “Although not part of this study, it should be noted that different components of IQ might rise and fall at different times across the life span (Hartshorne & Germine, 2015).”
• A distributed brain network predicts general intelligence from resting-state human neuroimaging data (2018, background): “There is one major finding that supports a distinction between fluid and crystallized intelligence ​[29]​: though the two are highly correlated, they change differentially with age [30,31]​.”