Is age–related mental retardation a myth?

What happens to a person's cognitive abilities as they age? Instead of confirming the theory of their gradual extinction, scientists from the University of Tübingen, working under the guidance of Dr. Michael Ramscar, found that standard assessment methods developed at the beginning of the 20th century are biased and provide unreliable information about the real level of cognitive abilities.

The authors used the so-called big data technology (from the English Big Data), used to create computer models simulating the activity of a person's mental activity when testing his cognitive abilities. Computers "train" in the same way as humans, allowing them to read a certain amount of information per day and learn new data as they do.

When a computer was allowed to "read" only a fixed amount of information, the results it received when testing for the level of cognitive abilities corresponded to the results of an adult young person. However, if the same computer received information, the amount of which corresponded to that received by a person during his lifetime, he showed results corresponding to the results of an elderly person. Often in such cases, the execution of tasks took longer, but this was not due to a decrease in the computer's ability to process data, but was due to an increase in the computer's database and, accordingly, a large amount of information requiring processing.

Traditionally, it is believed that older people have difficulty finding the right word due to the fact that the ability to memorize words deteriorates with age. However, the data obtained by the authors call this assumption into question. To clarify , Ramscar gives the following example: "Let's say a person knows the dates of birth of two people and can almost accurately name them. Would you say that his memory is better than the memory of a person who knows the dates of birth of 2,000 people, but is able to name the correct date only in 9 cases out of 10"? Researchers, at least from a computational point of view, have demonstrated that the answer to this question is "no".

The results obtained by them indicate that changes in the results of testing cognitive abilities that manifest with age, previously considered evidence of the extinction of mental activity, actually demonstrate the use of more information to find answers.

As an example, let's take the traditional test for learning through paired associations. It consists in the fact that a person must learn to associate pairs of words in memory, for example, "up-down" or "cracker tie". The use of Big Data technology to estimate the frequency of occurrence of word pairs in the English language has shown that young adults learn pairs of words like "up-down" more easily, since these words, unlike pairs of words like "tie-cracker", are often found in close proximity to each other. At the same time, they are less likely than older people to realize which pairs of words are usually used together and which are not.

Currently, a record number of elderly people live on our planet. The belief that cognitive abilities inevitably deteriorate with age often means that these people are viewed as a useless burden for society. However, as German researchers have shown, it is impossible to say that the brain's ability to process information decreases if the amount of information being processed is unknown. None of the tests used by the authors to assess the amount of this information revealed signs of a decrease in the "throughput" of the brain. Based on this, they came to the conclusion that older people simply need more time to complete such tasks, since their brains have to search for an answer in huge repositories of information accumulated over the years.

Article by Michael Ramscar et al. The Myth of Cognitive Decline: Non-Linear Dynamics of Lifelong Learning is published in the journal Topics in Cognitive Science.

Evgeniya Ryabtseva
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru based on Wiley materials:
Rethinking Aging: Older Brains Slower Due to Greater Experience, Rather than Cognitive Decline.

23.01.2014