Older Really Can Mean Wiser - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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mental faculties that improve with age.
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Knowledge is a large part of the equation, of course. People who are middle-aged and older tend to know more than young adults, by virtue of having been around longer, and score higher on vocabulary tests, crossword puzzles and other measures of so-called crystallized intelligence.
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the older brain offers something more, according to a new paper in the journal Psychological Science. Elements of social judgment and short-term memory, important pieces of the cognitive puzzle, may peak later in life than previously thought.
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The researchers found that the broad split in age-related cognition — fluid in the young, crystallized in the old — masked several important nuances.
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A year ago, German scientists argued that cognitive “deficits” in aging were caused largely by the accumulation of knowledge — that is, the brain slows down because it has to search a larger mental library of facts
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Experts said the new analysis raised a different question: Are there distinct, independent elements of memory and cognition that peak at varying times of life?
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The strength of the new analysis is partly in its data. The study evaluated historic scores from the popular Wechsler intelligence test, and compared them with more recent results from tens of thousands of people who took short cognitive tests on the authors’ websites, testmybrain.org and gameswithwords.org
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The one drawback of this approach is that, because it didn’t follow the same people over a lifetime, it might have missed the effect of different cultural experiences
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most previous studies have not been nearly as large, or had such a range of ages. Participants on the websites were 10 to 89 years old, and they took a large battery of tests, measuring skills like memory for abstract symbols and strings of digits, problem solving, and facility reading emotions from strangers’ eyes.
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“We found different abilities really maturing or ripening at different ages,” Dr. Germine said. “It’s a much richer picture of the life span than just calling it aging.”
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Processing speed — the quickness with which someone can manipulate digits, words or images, as if on a mental sketch board — generally peaks in the late teens
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But the capacity of that sketch board, called working memory, peaks at least a decade later and is slow to decline. In particular, the ability to recall faces and do some mental manipulation of numbers peaked about age 30,
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The researchers also analyzed results from the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. The test involves looking at snapshots of strangers’ eyes on a computer screen and determining their moods from a menu of options like “tentative,” “uncertain” and “skeptical.”
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people in their 40s or 50s consistently did the best, the study found, and the skill declined very slowly later in life
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The picture that emerges from these findings is of an older brain that moves more slowly than its younger self, but is just as accurate in many areas and more adept at reading others’ moods — on top of being more knowledgeable. That’s a handy combination, given that so many important decisions people make intimately affects others.