Mental Speed Rarely Changes Over a Lifespan

Study reveals that the speed of cognitive information processing stays exceptionally stable over decades

Mental speed– the speed at which we can manage problems needing quick decision-making– does not change significantly over the years. Psychologists at Heidelberg University came to this conclusion under the leadership of Dr. Mischa von Krause and Dr. Stefan Radev. They assessed data from a large-scale online experiment with more than a million participants.

The new study’s findings propose that the speed of cognitive information processing remains mostly stable between the ages of 20 and 60 and only weakens at advanced ages. The Heidelberg researchers have thus questioned the belief that mental speed begins to decline currently in early adulthood.

” The common belief is that the older we get, the more slowly we respond to outside stimuli. If that were so, mental speed would be fastest at around the age of twenty and would then decrease with increasing age,” claims Dr von Krause, a scientist in the Quantitative Research Methods department headed by Prof. Dr. Andreas Voß at Heidelberg University’s Institute of Psychology.

The researchers reviewed data from a large-scale American study on implicit biases to validate this theory. In the online experiment with more than a million participants, subjects needed to push a button to sort pictures of individuals into the categories “white” or “black” and words into the categories “good” or “bad.” According to Dr. von Krause, the content emphasis was of minor relevance in the Heidelberg study. Instead, the scientists utilized the large set of data as an example of a response-time task to measure the duration of cognitive decisions.

It comes with age

When examining the data, Dr. von Krause and his colleagues mentioned that, on average, the reaction times of the test subjects increased with increasing age. Nevertheless, with the aid of a mathematical model, they revealed that changes in mental speed did not cause this phenomenon.

“Instead, we believe that older test subjects are mostly slower because they reply extra cautiously and focus more on minimizing mistakes,” Mischa von Krause explains. At the same time, motor execution speed decelerates during adult life: older participants in the experiment required longer to push the suitable key after discovering the right answer.

One more finding of the study was that average information processing speed only progressively decreased with individuals over the age of 60. “It looks as though, throughout our life, we do not need to dread any kind of considerable losses of mental speed– particularly not during a common working life,” claims Mischa von Krause. “Generally speaking, we ought to also note that the test subjects in all age groups consisted of individuals with low and high mental speeds. Our results relate to the average trend.”

The German Research Foundation (DFG) financed the research study work in the context of the research training team for doctoral students “Statistical Modelling in Psychology” (GRK 2277). The results were released in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

Read the original article on Science Daily.

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