The Myth of Cognitive Decline: Non-Linear Dynamics of Lifelong Learning

Our doctors should not be using age as a reason for cognitive decline. Demand that they find and solve the real problem. Your doctor should be able to handle that simple task. Its only 38 pages.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tops.12078/pdf

Michael Ramscar, Peter Hendrix, Cyrus Shaoul, Petar Milin, Harald Baayen

Department

of

Linguistics,

Universit

€ubingen

at

T€

Abstract

As adults age, their performance on many psychometric tests changes systematically, a finding

that is widely taken to reveal that cognitive information-processing capacities decline across adulthood.

Contrary to this, we suggest that older adults’ changing performance reflects memory search

demands, which escalate as experience grows. A series of simulations show how the performance

patterns observed across adulthood emerge naturally in learning models as they acquire knowledge.

The simulations correctly identify greater variation in the cognitive performance of older

adults, and successfully predict that older adults will show greater sensitivity to fine-grained differences

in the properties of test stimuli than younger adults. Our results indicate that older adults’

performance on cognitive tests reflects the predictable consequences of learning on information-

processing, and not cognitive decline. We consider the implications of this for our scientific and

cultural understanding of aging.