21 - Adulthood:
Cognitive Development
What is intelligence?

Spearman’s “G”
◦ General intelligence
◦ One basic trait
◦ Inferred from vocabulary, memory, &
reasoning
Age & Intelligence
IQ – Once thought to decline after age
20
 Now thought to raise throughout
adulthood (20 – 50) and declines at age
60, or 70, or 80.
 Seattle longitudinal study

◦ People improve during adulthood and decline
later in life.
Components of Intelligence
Two clusters (Cattell)

Fluid intelligence
◦
◦
◦
◦

Quick and flexible
Provides easy learning
Good working memory & abstract thought
Decreases during adulthood
Crystallized intelligence
◦ Accumulated learning
◦ Vocabulary - Language
◦ Increases during adulthood
Three forms (Sternberg)

Analytic intelligence
◦ Book smarts
 Remembering things in high school and college
 Valued in emerging adulthood

Creative intelligence
◦ Flexible
◦ Imaginative thinking
◦ Not standard or conventional

Practical intelligence
◦ Street smarts
Age & culture
Analytic valued in high school and college
 Creative valued for new challenges
 Practical valued during adulthood

Selective gains and losses
Selective Optimization with
compensation

People select what they want to focus on
◦ E.g. Pediatric nursing (Selection)

People compensate for aging or other
difficulties
◦ E.g. Wear glasses or increase type size on
computer (Compensation)

Build their nursing expertise
(Optimization)
Expert Cognition (Thinking)
Selective expert
Intelligence increases in areas of interest
 Everyone has more skill and knowledge
than others in what they are interested in

“Expert”
E.g. Brain surgeon
 More skilled and knowledgeable than
novices

Characteristics of Expert Cognition
(Thinking)

Intuitive
◦ Rely on past experience
◦ More intuitive, less Stereotypical
◦ Knows when to bend formal procedures and
rules
◦ E.g. “Gut feeling” that this is what to do

Automatic
◦ Thinking without deliberate, conscious thought
 E.g. Driving
◦ Process most tasks automatically
 Saving conscious thought for unfamiliar challenges
Characteristics of Expert cognition
(Thinking) - Cont.

Strategic
◦ Better strategies handling unexpected
problems

Flexible
◦ Being creative and flexible when needed.

Example = “The miracle on the Hudson”
Flight
Expertise and age
Expertise needs time, training, ability and
practice to develop
 Expertise can overcome some effects of
age
 Experienced adults often use selective
optimization with compensation
 Seattle study

◦ Intellectual functioning can increase if older
adults do paid work that is intellectually
stimulating