Intelligence
Intelligence generally can be thought of as including:
- a range of abilities that allow us to make sense of our experiences
- capacity to comprehend new information
- ability to think abstractly
- skill to make rational decisions
- spatial ability
- numerical ability
- verbal fluency
There is a great deal of variability in the test scores of older adults, with some older persons actually doing better than some younger persons. Moreover, older adults' intellectual functioning can be improved significantly with training and practice, although improvements generally are less than those experienced by younger persons with the same amount of training.
The fact that older persons seem to perform more poorly on tests of fluid intelligence is due in part to reduced efficiency of nerve transmission in the brain, resulting in slower information processing and greater loss of information during transmission.
However, intelligence decreases may be due to a variety of non-cognitive factors, including impairments in motor ability and sensation. Slower motor performance can significantly reduce an older person's ability to respond on tests that require fine hand movements (e.g., filling in the proper rectangle on an answer sheet).
Sensory deficits associated with aging, for example, can result in perceptual inaccuracies, requiring the aging mind to commit more attention and cognitive effort to comprehending sensory input and reducing its capacity to quickly process new information.
Other factors affecting cognitive performance in older adults are only indirectly related to the aging process itself. For example, older persons typically have fewer years of education.
When making decisions, older persons have been found to sacrifice speed for accuracy, rejecting quick, simplistic solutions to problems and preferring to work slowly, examining issues from a variety of perspectives before selecting a response. Finally, many of the health problems that are more common in later life (e.g., cardiovascular problems) can significantly affect cognitive functioning.
Not all cognitive changes in later life are negative, however. Older persons typically exhibit:
- greater experience-based knowledge
- increased accuracy
- better judgment
- generally improved ability to handle familiar tasks than younger persons
Such applied knowledge, or wisdom, may in fact be considerably more important to one's ability to accomplish most tasks of day-to-day life than are the abstract abilities tapped by intelligence tests.
Even when the aging process affects physical or cognitive competencies, older adults often are able to develop strategies for compensating partially or totally. For example, older typists have been found to type as quickly and as accurately as younger typists even though they are unable to move their fingers as fast, because they have developed a better ability to anticipate upcoming words and locate the proper keys on the typewriter.
In general, older adults can perform about as well as younger persons on tasks, which provide sufficient opportunity to compensate for slower physical and cognitive functioning.
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