When is the peak of cognitive skills of the brain such as memory power and information processing speed?

ByJess Ruby

Although it is common to think that those who are younger than older have faster head rotation and higher memory ability, but from the results of a large-scale survey using the Internet, the peak of cognitive skills is not only when young , It turns out that different kinds of cognitive function peaks also in around 30 to 40 generations.

When Does Cognitive Functioning Peak? The Asynchronous Rise and Fall of Different Cognitive Abilities Across the Life Span
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/03/06/0956797614567339.abstract

The rise and fall of cognitive skills | MIT News
http://news.mit.edu/2015/brain-peaks-at-different-ages-0306


"Ability to quickly think and remember things"Liquidity intelligenceIs believed to be powerful for a long time as the theory that ability gradually decreases after reaching the peak at about 20 years old. However, the question of how the cognitive function changes with age, because it requires cooperation of many examinees, it was difficult to conduct a large-scale survey. Therefore, in the research conducted by the neuroscientists team at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital, "Gameswithwords.org"When"Testmybrain.orgIt is said that he decided to conduct a survey for a wide range of age groups by making a website called "the Internet".

Dr. Joshua Hartshorne of MIT's brain cognitive science who conducted the survey said, "At any age, there are phenomena of ability improvement, decline, and flatness, and we define what is the best age group It is difficult to do. " Laura Germine, a co-author of the thesis, Dr. Neurodevelopmental Genetics, said, "The changes that occur as people grow older are different from what has been studied so far in psychology and neuroscience." It is. Mr. Hartshorne and Mr. Germine each published a paper on human cognitive function by themselves, but I thought that we needed more data and started joint research.

Mr. Hartshorne and Germine measure IQ before doing research on the InternetWechsler adult intelligence testWe have collected past test results of Wechsler memory test. The data was several decades ago, and a total of 30 different intelligence such as memorization of numbers, visual search, jigsaw puzzle etc. were measured. Looking at the peak age of intelligence from each test result, it became clear that the peak of cognitive function is not settled in a specific age group, but there exist different cognitive function peaks in every age group He said that. However, since the amount of data in past materials was small, I heard that the Internet survey was started using the above-mentioned website.

ByVictoria Nevland

At gameswithwords.org and testmybrain.org, we performed four cognitive function tasks with different peak age of cognitive ability according to the result of Wechsler test aggregation, and added a test to measure emotion further. Over the course of several years I gathered about 3 million data and got a broad perspective on aging and cognitive function. For example, the information processing speed is the fastest when it is between 18 and 19 years old, and falls sharply when it is over 20 years old. On the other hand, it seems that short-term memory turned out to be 25 to 35 years old, and the ability to infer the feelings of others was found to be the best in the 40s to 50s.

Christopher Chabris, a member of the research team and associate professor of psychology at Union University, said, "The success of this research is that the research team was good at the ability to collect and analyze vast amounts of data. Such a method is not done much in the field of cognitive psychology because we have to find a pattern from a huge amount of data.The point that "why the age group that celebrates the peak of cognitive function is not constant and it is different" For further information, further investigation is necessary. " Mr. Hartshorne and Mr. Germine are working on working to make the information gathered on the website public data and make it possible for other researchers to utilize the data for investigation and analysis.