Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2007 Sep;22(3):546-57.
doi: 10.1037/0882-7974.22.3.546.

Not your parents' test scores: cohort reduces psychometric aging effects

Elizabeth M Zelinski  1 , Robert F Kennison
Affiliations

Not your parents' test scores: cohort reduces psychometric aging effects

Elizabeth M Zelinski et al. Psychol Aging. 2007 Sep.

Abstract

Increases over birth cohorts in psychometric abilities may impact effects of aging. Data from 2 cohorts of the Long Beach Longitudinal Study, matched on age but tested 16 years apart, were modeled over ages 55-87 to test the hypothesis that the more fluid abilities of reasoning, list and text recall, and space would show larger cohort differences than vocabulary. This hypothesis was confirmed. At age 74, average performance estimates for people from the more recently born cohort were equivalent to those of people from the older cohort when they were up to 15 years younger. This finding suggests that older adults may perform like much younger ones from the previous generation on fluid measures, indicating higher levels of abilities than expected. This result could have major implications for the expected productivity of an aging workforce as well as for the quality of life of future generations. However, cohort improvements did not mitigate age declines.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Data plots for individuals on reasoning (top) and vocabulary (bottom) by cohort. Plots include all data from Cohorts 1 and 2 for ages 55 to 87.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Estimated longitudinal changes for vocabulary, space, list recall, text recall, and reasoning for Cohort 1 (C1) and Cohort 2 (C2) between ages 55 and 87 for the two-piece models. The line at age 74 represents the intercept of the models.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Akaike H. Factor analysis and AIC. Psychometrika. 1987;52:317–332.
    1. Alwin DF. Family of origin and cohort differences in verbal ability. American Sociological Review. 1991;56:625–638.
    1. Alwin DF, McCammon RJ. Aging, cohorts, and verbal ability. Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences. 2001;56:S151–S161. - PubMed
    1. Barber N. Educational and ecological correlates of IQ: A cross-national investigation. Intelligence. 2005;33:273–284.
    1. Blair C, Gamson D, Thorne S, Baker D. Rising mean IQ: Cognitive demand of mathematics education for young children, population exposure to formal schooling, and the neurobiology of the pre-frontal cortex. Intelligence. 2005;33:93–106.

Publication types