http://pss.sagepub.com/content/24/9/1747.abstract
- 1Center for Lifespan Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany
- 2German Institute for International Educational Research, Frankfurt, Germany
- 3Aging Research Center, Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm University
- 4Department of Psychology, Lund University
- Florian Schmiedek, German Institute for International Educational Research, Schloßstr. 29, 60486 Frankfurt am Main, Germany E-mail: schmiedek@dipf.de
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Author Contributions F. Schmiedek, M. Lövdén, and U. Lindenberger designed the study. F. Schmiedek organized the data collection and conducted the analysis. F. Schmiedek, M. Lövdén, and U. Lindenberger discussed and interpreted the findings and wrote the manuscript.
Abstract
People often attribute poor performance to
having bad days. Given that cognitive aging leads to lower average
levels of performance
and more moment-to-moment variability, one might
expect that older adults should show greater day-to-day variability and
be
more likely to experience bad days than younger
adults. However, both researchers and ordinary people typically sample
only
one performance per day for a given activity.
Hence, the empirical basis for concluding that cognitive performance
does substantially
vary from day to day is inadequate. On the basis of
data from 101 younger and 103 older adults who completed nine cognitive
tasks in 100 daily sessions, we show that the
contributions of systematic day-to-day variability to overall observed
variability
are reliable but small. Thus, the impression of
good versus bad days is largely due to performance fluctuations at
faster
timescales. Despite having lower average levels of
performance, older adults showed more consistent levels of performance
across days.
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