WHAT ARE THE COGNITIVE CHANGES
ASSOCIATED
WITH
NORMAL
AGING?
American Psychological Association
Table of Contents
Why Practitioners Need Information
Some cognitive abilities decline with age, some may improve, and some
show little change. Such changes are highly variable from one person to
another, and even vary within a given person for different aspects of cognition.
For example, creativity can continue into the ninth decade of life. For
those functions that do decline, the change is not severe enough to cause
significant impairment in daily occupational or social functioning, as occurs
with a dementing disorder such as Alzheimer's disease. Some general findings
include:
- Information processing speed declines with age, which may result in a slower learning rate and greater need for repetition of new information.
- Divided attention between two simultaneous tasks shows age-related decline, as does ability to switch attention rapidly between multiple auditory inputs, although ability to switch attention between visual inputs does not change much with age. Overall levels of performance in sustained attention or vigilance tasks appear to reduce with age. Filtering out irrelevant information through selective attention also appears to decline with age.
- Short-term, or primary, memory shows relatively less age-related decline.
- Long-term, or secondary, memory shows more substantial age changes, although the decline is greater for recall than for recognition, and performance generally benefits from cueing.
- Most aspects of language ability are well-preserved, such as the use
of language sounds, meaningful combination of words, and verbal comprehension;
and some aspects may continue to improve with age, such as vocabulary.
However, word-finding, or naming, ability and rapid word list generation
show
declines with age. - A variety of tasks shows age-related visuospatial decline, including three-dimensional construction and drawing.
- Abstraction and mental flexibility also show some decline with age.
- An accumulation of practical expertise, or wisdom, may continue toward the very end of life.
