These cognitive abilities reach a peak when a person ages

Many people do not look, feel or behave in their age. However, sooner or later, time takes its toll. Some of the abilities that you possessed in your youth are already inaccessible to you.

However, there are other aspects in which you have become much better than before. The researchers found that different mental skills reach their peak at different stages of human life.

What cognitive ability improves in old age?

In 2015, Joshua Hartshorn and Laura Jermin of Harvard University determined when exactly the different types of cognitive activities are the most powerful. This study included several experiments, and a large amount of information was obtained from the two sites that they created to conduct a variety of cognitive tests there. For several years, these sites have collected data from nearly three million users. One of the tests, organized by scientists, passed almost two and a half thousand Americans from different parts of the country, of different ages and different professions. They had to complete fifteen tasks, starting with mathematical problems and ending with linguistic questionnaires and completing incomplete images.

Research results: old age is not the end

The results showed that most of the mental abilities, such as memory, retelling stories and pattern recognition, reached their peak at the end of adolescence and immediately after people were twenty years old. However, some important abilities developed at a more mature age and reached their peak after fifty years. Among them were vocabulary, mathematics, general knowledge and understanding (to determine the last point, a test was conducted in which people needed to describe how they understood certain concepts). All these abilities appear in a person due to the constant accumulation of knowledge, so that the influence here has a life experience. In fact, vocabulary comes to a peak even later, when people turn 60-70 years old. So now you know why your grandfather is so good at crossword puzzles.

In addition, scientists used another way to determine the dependence of abilities and age. As part of this experiment, the participants were shown family photos, which they then needed to be reproduced in detail. In general, as part of a test conducted on one of the sites in which more than ten thousand people took part, it was discovered that people over the age of forty have a much more impressive vocabulary. However, those people who were under the age of thirty coped much better with the tasks related to memory.

Optimal age

Is there a certain age in which all the mental faculties of a person reach their maximum? Researchers do not think so. "At any age you become better in some things, but at the same time you become worse in others, and in the third you are on an average level. Most likely, there is no specific age in which you would reach a peak in most abilities, let alone age at which you could reach a peak in all your mental faculties, "said Joshua Hartshorn.

Another study

The study, conducted in 2014 by Canadian scientists, allowed to look at the question from a different angle. Researchers analyzed the information received from more than three thousand players of Starcraft 2 at the age of 16 to 44 years. They found that younger gamers were much more likely to cope with certain tasks. For example, a 24-year-old player was 150 milliseconds faster than a player of the same caliber at the age of 39 years. In general, scientists have found that the optimal age of the gamer is 24 years, after which his abilities gradually begin to decrease.