Applied Themes in Ageing

Can mental exercise minimise age-related decline?

Training effects are most robust for trained tasks, but show less reliable retention of the gains over time, or generalisation to other tasks

What are the methodological issues around training lifestyles?

Hard to conduct and have an unclear underlying theory

What are the effects of ageing in more real-world settings?

Prosocial behaviour increases with age, and wisdom-related knowledge and age gains in expertise appear to be domain-specific.

How do the results of ageing in a real world setting connect to basic, lab-based research?

Disconnects between real life and lab may result from these factors, as well as support structures, and other non-cognitive factors that are absent in the lab.

What is mental exercise in intuitive reasoning?

The brain is like a muscle: the more you train it, the more mentally fit you will be

What is mental exercise in theoretical reasoning?

Expanding WM capacity should also benefit the cognitive functions that it constrains

What is the way to establish a clear & causal role for mental exercise?

Intervention methods

What did Singh-Manoux et al. (2003) find regarding leisure and cognitive ability?

Stronger positive correlations between high cognitive leisure and cognitive ability compared to the correlations between cognitive ability and low cognitive effort leisure.

What is the differential preservation hypothesis?

Mental activity as a factor that protects against age-related decline in mental ability

What is the preserved differentiation hypothesis?

Mental activity is at least partly a manifestation of one’s prior level of mental ability

What are the major methodological issues in the literature for training?

Conditions, random assignment, active vs passive, publication bias & adaptive procedures

What are the major theoretic issues in the training literature?

Unclear what we are training

What are the major practical issues in the training literature?

Gains are long-term, initial cognitive ability as a moderator, near and far transfer effects

What are far transfer effects?

We’ve identified a crucial causal mechanism that underpins a range of aptitudes and behaviours

What did a meta-analysis by Karbach & Verhaegen (2014) find with task training studies?

Training gains in the trained task, but also evidence of near and far transfer

What did Melby-Lervåg & Hulme (2016) find regarding the issues with Karbach & Verhaegen (2014)’s meta analysis?

The effectiveness of mental exercise (i.e., training WM) in terms of far transfer is doubtful; we only see clear benefits for trained tasks

What are the characteristics of successful ageing? (Rowe & Kahn, 1987)

High cognitive & physical function

Low probability of disease & disability

Active engagement in life

What did Park et al. (2013) find?

Episodic memory showed the best benefits from being in the photography lifestyle group, but little less going on

Where to older adults excel?

Semantic Memory

How do older adults perform with concern for others?

Prosocial traits and behaviours increase across adulthood whilst negative behavioural tendencies decline

How does wisdom correlate with age?

Non-significant relationship

How does expertise correlate with age?

Domain-specific benefits in expertise areas

What is the relationship between age & expertise in terms of main effects and interactions?

Main effects of age and expertise, but no interaction: expertise does not protect against age-related decline in a domain of expertise.

How else might we explain the disconnect between lab findings of age-related decline and real-world findings of sustained good performance?

1. We seldom need to perform at our absolute maximal level

2. Shift with age from novel processing to relying on accumulated knowledge

3. Cognition is not the only determinant of success in life

4. Accommodations: on the part of the individual to adapt, to conceal deficits, environment/technology changes, etc.