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Review
. 2012:63:201-26.
doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-120710-100328. Epub 2011 Jul 5.

Consequences of age-related cognitive declines

Timothy Salthouse  1
Affiliations
Review

Consequences of age-related cognitive declines

Timothy Salthouse. Annu Rev Psychol. 2012.

Abstract

Adult age differences in a variety of cognitive abilities are well documented, and many of those abilities have been found to be related to success in the workplace and in everyday life. However, increased age is seldom associated with lower levels of real-world functioning, and the reasons for this lab-life discrepancy are not well understood. This article briefly reviews research concerned with relations of age to cognition, relations of cognition to successful functioning outside the laboratory, and relations of age to measures of work performance and achievement. The final section discusses several possible explanations for why there are often little or no consequences of age-related cognitive declines in everyday functioning.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Distributions at each age between 20 and 75 from the U.S. population (2000 Census), the top 25% of the scores on the reasoning composite from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Fourth Edition, and CEOs of Fortune 500 companies as of December 2009.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Means (and standard errors) for composite measures of accumulated knowledge and novel problem solving in the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV) standardization sample and in studies by Salthouse and colleagues.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Measures of achievement as a function of age from studies by Lehman (1962, 1966).
Figure 4
Figure 4
Means (and standard errors) of performance on an analytical reasoning test and on a crossword puzzle test from studies by Salthouse and colleagues.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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