Attention and normal ageing

Abstract

Over the past twenty-five years, a great deal of evidence has been accumulated indicating that advancing age is accompanied by a systematic decline in performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks, both in the laboratory and in everyday life. However, age-related decline is not observed in all situations, and older adults may even show a relative advantage in some tasks. In this perspective, a life-span theory of intellectual development has been proposed which distinguishes between two components of cognitive functioning: the mechanics and the pragmatics of cognition (Baltes, Staudinger, and Lindenberger, 1999). The mechanics of cognition are considered as an expression of basic and biological information processing, while the pragmatics of cognition are associated with acquired knowledge mediated through culture. Abilities that critically involve mechanics, such as reasoning, spatial orientation, or perceptual speed, generally show roughly linear decline during adulthood. In contrast, more pragmatic abilities, such as verbal (semantic memory) knowledge, have weak, and even sometimes positive, age relations.

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