Selective Gains and Losses in Adult Cognition PDF

Selective Gains and Losses Aging neurons, cultural pressures, historical conditions, and past education all affect adult cognition. None of these can be controlled directly by an individual. Nonetheless, many researchers believe that adults make crucial choices about intellectual development, decidi...

Selective Gains and Losses Aging neurons, cultural pressures, historical conditions, and past education all affect adult cognition. None of these can be controlled directly by an individual. Nonetheless, many researchers believe that adults make crucial choices about intellectual development, deciding how to develop their minds. What’s the Point? This time, you write the caption! (Use creative intelligence.) Selective Optimization Paul and Margret Baltes (1990) developed a theory called selective optimization with compensation to describe the “general process of systematic functioning” (Baltes, 2003, p. 25), by which people maintain a balance in their lives as they grow older. They believe that people seek to optimize their development, selecting the best way to compensate for physical and cognitive losses, becoming more proficient at activities they want to perform well. This applies to every aspect of life, ranging from choosing friends to playing baseball. Each adult seeks to maximize gains and minimize losses, practicing some abilities and ignoring others. Choices are critical, because any ability can be enhanced or diminished, depending on how, when, and why a person uses it. It is possible to “teach an old dog new tricks,” but learning requires that adults want to learn those new tricks. As Baltes and Baltes (1990) explain, selective optimization means that each adult selects certain aspects of intelligence to optimize and neglects the rest. If those neglected aspects happen to be the ones measured on intelligence tests, then IQ scores will fall, even if the adult’s selection improves (optimizes) other aspects of intellect. The brain is plastic over the entire life span, developing new dendrites and activation sequences, adjusting to whatever the person chooses to learn (Karmiloff-Smith, 2010). Modern life requires continual improvement in vocabulary but less competence in math, as calculators and cash registers replace what once was done by the brain. As you saw in Figure 12.4 on page 386, that is exactly what adult brains do. Expert Cognition Everyone develops expertise, becoming a selective expert. Adults are not restrained, as most children and adolescents are, by the demand to do and learn everything: physics and poetry, basketball and baseball, handwriting and texting. Instead, adults specialize in activities that are personally meaningful — anything from car repair to gourmet cooking, from illness diagnosis to fly fishing. As people develop expertise in some areas, they ignore others. DEFINING EXPERTISE An expert, as cognitive scientists define it, is not necessarily someone with rare and outstanding proficiency (Dall’Alba, 2018). Although sometimes the term expert connotes an extraordinary genius, to researchers it means more — and less — than that. Expertise is not innate, although it may begin with inherited abilities that are later developed (Hambrick et al., 2016). Culture and context guide people in this process. A current example is use of technology. Young people are much better at using computers, cell phones, and even smoke alarms than older adults are. DEFINING EXPERTISE An expert, as cognitive scientists define it, is not necessarily someone with rare and outstanding proficiency (Dall’Alba, 2018). Although sometimes the term expert connotes an extraordinary genius, to researchers it means more — and less — than that. Expertise is not innate, although it may begin with inherited abilities that are later developed (Hambrick et al., 2016). Culture and context guide people in this process. A current example is use of technology. Young people are much better at using computers, cell phones, and even smoke alarms than older adults are. Chapter App 12 Freedom iOS: https://tinyurl.com/y6y6o4u2 ANDROID: https://tinyurl.com/y58wyjv9 RELEVANT TOPIC: Multitasking and concentration in adulthood This app and website blocker helps adults reclaim focus and productivity. Simply select distracting and time-consuming apps from a pre-made blocklist or create your own custom blocklist to temporarily block as many apps as you would like, at a specified time and/or for a certain length of time. Users report gaining an average of 2.5 hours of productive time each day. This is glaringly important in texting. In 2014, one teen from Brazil took only 18.19 seconds to text “The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human” (Lee, 2014). You may not agree that that young man was an expert (he won a prize), but it is evident that everyone chooses to specialize in some tasks while ignoring others. Expertise has become increasingly important as societies become more complex: Adults no longer do everything for themselves, unlike thousands of years ago, when families sewed their own clothes, hunted or gathered their own food, and treated their own illnesses. Currently we find experts to do practically everything for us, with precooked food, medical specialists, technicians who repair just one kind of appliance (and sometimes just one brand), and so on. One amusing result of the COVID-19 pandemic was that stores and companies were sold out of flour, because many people suddenly needed and wanted to bake their own bread. My niece tried to order a 25-pound bag online: It was put on back order. THE FOUR COMPONENTS OF EXPERTISE Time, education, and effort transform people as they gain knowledge, practice, and experience. They become experts when the quality, not just the quantity, of their cognition advances. Expert thought is (1) intuitive, (2) automatic, (3) strategic, and (4) flexible, as we now describe. First, intuition, which sometimes is portrayed as opposing evidence and therefore inferior. But that is not necessarily true (Wieten, 2018). Expert intuition incorporates past experience, seeming to leap over logic — sometimes with excellent results, sometime not. Second, the complex action and skill required for many tasks become routine for experts, making it appear that most aspects of the task are performed instinctively. In fact, some automatic actions are no longer accessible to the conscious mind. The automatic aspect of expertise is particularly evident in medicine, when experienced specialists diagnose an illness within seconds, unlike the newly minted doctor (Norman et al., 2018). If you are an experienced driver and try to teach someone else to drive, then you can see both intuition and automaticity in action. Excellent drivers who are inexperienced instructors find it hard to recognize or verbalize their intuitive and automatic responses — such as anticipating the movements of pedestrians and cyclists on the far side of the road, or feeling the gears shift on an incline, or hearing the tires lose traction on a bit of sand. Yet such factors differentiate the expert from the novice. This may explain why, despite powerful motivation, quicker reactions, and better vision, teenagers have three times the rate of fatal car accidents than adults over age 25 do. Sometimes young drivers deliberately take risks (speeding, running a red light, drinking, and so on), but often they simply do not perceive conditions that a more experienced adult would notice. Experts also are strategic, especially when problems are unexpected. Indeed, strategy may be the pivotal difference between a skilled person and an unskilled person. The difference between an expert airplane pilot is not book knowledge but familiarity with contingencies, allowing strategic understanding when unexpected problems occur (Durso et al., 2018). For instance, if the plane must land somewhere other than the runway, an expert pilot can guide the aircraft to safety on a field, or even on the water. Finally, perhaps because they are intuitive, automatic, and strategic, experts are also flexible, which may be the most important aspect of all. The expert artist, musician, chef, or scientist is creative and curious, deliberately experimenting, enjoying the unexpected (Csikszentmihalyi, 2013). Experts in all walks of life adapt to individual cases and exceptions — much as an expert chef will adjust ingredients, temperature, technique, and timing as a dish develops, tasting to see whether a little more spice is needed, seldom following a recipe exactly. Standards are high: Some cooks throw food in the garbage rather than serve a dish that many people would happily eat. Expert chess players, auto mechanics, and violinists are similarly aware of nuances that might escape the novice. Human survival may have depended on the brain’s plasticity (Winegard et al., 2018). Unlike our primate relatives, who share most genes with us, the “plasticity of evolved cognitive structures” allowed the expertise needed for humans to thrive. Expertise, Age, and Experience The relationship between expertise and age is not straightforward (Krampe & Charness, 2018). One essential requirement for expertise is time, both hours of practice and years of maturity. Each area of expertise has particular practice requirements. For example, in music, violinists need more practice to become proficient than singers do; in medicine, neurosurgeons need more practice than geriatric nurses; among political leaders, presidents need more experience than school board members. Of course, the latter of each of these pairs also benefit from years of practice, but no one becomes expert without many hours of learning. Circumstances, training, genes, ability, practice, and age all affect expertise, which means that experts in one specific field are often remarkably inexpert in other areas. For example, humans have adjusted to climate, each group developing the expertise needed for life in the Arctic, the desert, the islands, or the forest. Food, shelter, and child care are radically different in each of these places; each community has experts who teach the young what they need to know. No other animal lives on every continent. By adulthood people learn to live where we are. This is glaringly evident when someone from the tropics is sent to Canada, or someone in Texas experiences a snowstorm. One final example of the relationship between age and job effectiveness comes from an occupation familiar to all of us: driving a taxi. This is not an easy job. In major cities, taxi drivers must find the best route (factoring in traffic, construction, time of day, and many other details) while knowing where new passengers are likely to be found and how to relate to customers, some of whom might want to talk, others not. Research in England — where taxi drivers “have to learn the layout of 25,000 streets in London and the locations of thousands of places of interest, and pass stringent examinations” (Woollett et al., 2009, p. 1407) — found not only that the drivers became more expert with time but also that their brains adjusted to the need for particular knowledge. Red Means Go! The red shows the activated brain areas in London taxi drivers as they navigated the busy London streets. Not only were these areas more active than the same areas in the average person’s brain, but they also had more dendrites. In addition, the longer a cabby had been driving, the more brain growth was evident. This research confirms plasticity, implying that we all could develop new skills, not only by remembering but also by engaging in activities that change the very structures of our brains. Some parts of their brains (areas dedicated to spatial representation) were more extensive and active than those of an average person (Woollett et al., 2009). On ordinary IQ tests, the taxi drivers’ scores were average, but their expertise was apparent in navigating London. FAMILY SKILLS This discussion of expertise has cited occupations (surgeons, musicians, taxi drivers) that once had far more male than female workers. In recent years, three important shifts have occurred that add to this topic. First, more women are educated than before. As you learned in Chapter 11, in the United States and many other nations, women are more likely to attend college than men are. This has changed entire societies. That allowed the second change: more women working in occupations traditionally reserved for men. Remember from Chapter 2 that Virginia Apgar, when she earned her M.D. in 1933, was told she could not be a surgeon because only men were surgeons. Fortunately for the survival of millions of newborns, she did not quit hospital medicine. Today that sexist assumption has changed; half of the new M.D.s in the United States are women, including thousands of surgeons (see Figure 12.5). More generally, most college women expect to be professionals, wives, and mothers. And that led to a third change: What once was called “women’s work” has become gender neutral, benefiting men and children. In earlier generations, women sometimes said they were “just a housewife,” even though they met the biological, cognitive, and psychosocial needs of several children as well as their husbands, neighbors, and community. Recently, however, the importance of family work and community is increasingly recognized, and men as well as women do it. The skill, flexibility, and strategies needed to raise a family are a manifestation of expertise. Here again, age matters. Although fertility and easy births are more common in the late teens, older fathers and mothers tend to be more patient, with lower rates of child abuse as well as more successful offspring. Of course, the mere passage of time does not make a person a better parent. However, an expert on the science of parenting concludes that, in general, as people gain in maturity and experience, “the more appropriate and optimal their parenting cognitions and practices are likely to be” (Bornstein, 2015, p. 91). (See A Case to Study.) A Case To Study Parenting Expertise What makes an expert parent? This case to study is about one mother, Magdalene Hurtado, who knew how to care for a baby as she learned in her home community (the United States) and discovered that baby care was not the same in another culture. She is not the only one who does not always know what is universally true for human development, and what is cultural. You have read several examples: Some infants are fed formula from birth on, some are breast fed for years, some are put to sleep on their stomachs in their own crib from day one, some sleep beside their parents until they are teenagers. When mothers from diverse cultures meet, some are shocked by the routine practices of the others. However, practices that are well-suited in one cultural context might not be in another. Hurtado is a social scientist who studied the Ache, an indigenous tribe living in the jungle in Paraguay. She had traveled to Paraguay many times, finding the Ache people respectful and deferential. She admired them, and developed close relationships with several of the women. After each visit, she returned to her work as a professor in the United States, publishing many books and articles that detailed her research. At one point, she married and had a baby. She returned to Paraguay to do further research, this time with her husband and her infant daughter. She had brought all the things her baby might need, including a baby-basket, designed to be carried easily and yet comfortable, as many other North American mothers have found. The Ache greeted her in a whole new way. They took her aside and in friendly and intimate but no-nonsense terms told her all the things she was doing wrong as a mother: This older woman sat with me and told me I must sleep with my daughter. They were horrified that I had a basket with me for her to sleep in…. here was a group of forest hunter-gatherers, people living in what Westerners would call basic conditions, giving instructions to a highly educated woman from a technologically sophisticated culture. [Hurtado, quoted in Small, 1998, pp. 213–214] The intelligent way to care for an infant in the United States (a basket allows easy transport and protects against SIDS) was not intelligent for the Ache. In that community, babies needed to sleep with their mothers to prevent bites from poisonous snakes or wild dogs, or kidnapping by strangers (that did happen among the Ache). A team of North American experts have developed a test to measure intelligent parenting, called the KIDI (Knowledge of Infant Development Inventory). In the United States, high scores on the KIDI often correlate with intelligent baby care (e.g., Graybill et al., 2016; Howard, 2010; McMillin et al., 2015). Thus, it is no surprise that scores on the KIDI predict later high-achievement among U.S.-born children. That is less true for children born elsewhere, because the KIDI does not universally correlate with effective mothering. Happy, successful children can be raised in many ways. Each culture and family adjusts practices to anticipate the needs of adults of that community. Developmentalists have not yet identified all of the components necessary to become an expert in child rearing, but at least we know that such expertise exists. For example, more experienced and mature parents are more likely to nip problems in the bud and recognize that some behaviors (that hairstyle, that music, that tattoo) are not worth fighting about. Hurtado was wise enough to listen to the Ache experts. DATA CONNECTIONS: Stress in Adulthood: Balancing Family and Career examines how well parents who are employed balance career and family responsibilities. As with all aspects of adult cognition, variation is apparent, and people of every age can be intelligent or ignorant. Remember that how much parents should talk with preverbal infants, whether they should let them cry, what to teach a child about dogs, or strangers, or guns depends on the culture more than on the nature of the child. What one parent thinks is rude, a parent elsewhere might appreciate; what one parent thinks is necessary guidance, another might call abuse. As parents become more experienced within their particular culture, they become expert. Raising a child teaches adults how to become the intuitive, strategic, and flexible expert parent that children need. For this, the children themselves get some credit. As one of my first two daughters said to the next two, “You should be grateful to me. I broke them [my husband and me] in.” As with all aspects of adult cognition, variation is apparent, and age and gender do not guarantee intelligence of any kind. But experience, on the job or in the family, may help.