Cognitive Development in Adulthood

Abstract

Abstract The term, “cognitive aging,” is typically used to refer to the area of developmental psychology focusing on the study of cognitive changes from young adulthood to very late life. Among the developmental processes of interest are those that reflect cognitive functioning, such as intelligence, memory, and reasoning. An underlying assumption is that cognition is used in different ways to accomplish different goals throughout adulthood, but that it is always a central component of one's concept of self—past, present, and future—and one's adjustment to challenges of everyday life. This area of lifespan developmental research is a particularly active one, in that it is at the crossroads of both classic theoretical questions and important issues of individual and social application. In this chapter, we summarize selected leading issues in the field of cognitive aging. These include: (1) intelligence and patterns of intellectual aging, (2) differential profiles associated with the “aging” of various systems of memory, (3) new topics in such memory‐related domains as metamemory and social‐interactive memory, and (4) emerging research in such novel domains as wisdom, creativity, compensation, and plasticity. We conclude that, because cognitive aging involves developmental processes that range from the neurological through the individual to the social levels of analyses, it will continue for the foreseeable future to fascinate scholars and anyone else who is curious about how and why cognitive changes occur throughout adulthood.

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