[Allocation of cognitive resources during the simultaneous performance of cognitive and sensorimotor tasks]. / Selektion, Optimierung und Kompensation in Doppelaufgaben.

We review research on the allocation of cognitive resources during the simultaneous performance of cognitive and sensorimotor tasks. From the developmental and clinical perspectives,we emphasize: (1) the distinction between the availability and the allocation of resources, (2) lifespan changes in relation to the environmental validity of sensorimotor functions, and (3) the potentials and limitations for an individuals' adaptations to multi-task constraints. These aspects can be operationalized within the framework of selection, optimization, and compensation (SOC). Related studies focus on older individuals' selective resource allocation and compensatory processes as adaptive means in the context of reduced resources and decreased sensorimotor functioning. Results show that older adults must invest increasing amounts of their cognitive resources into the coordination of bodily functions such as balance and gait. SOC research on Alzheimer's patients provides new insights into the increased risks of falling. We argue that adaptive resource allocation in everyday sensorimotor performance is an instance of intelligent behavior that is insufficiently represented in extant psychometric tests.

Walking while memorizing: age-related differences in compensatory behavior.

This study investigated predictions of the life-span theory of selection, optimization, and compensation, focusing on different patterns of task priority during dual-task performance in younger and older adults. Cognitive (memorizing) and sensorimotor (walking a narrow track) performance were measured singly, concurrently, and when task difficulty was manipulated. Use of external aids was measured to provide another index of task priority. Before dual-task testing, participants received extensive training with each component task and external aid. Age differences in dual-task costs were greater in memory performance than walking, suggesting that older adults prioritized walking over memory. Further, when given a choice of compensatory external aids to use, older adults optimized walking, whereas younger adults optimized memory performance. The results have broad implications for systemic theories of cognitive and sensorimotor aging, and the costs and benefits of assistive devices and environmental support for older populations.

The strong connection between sensory and cognitive performance in old age: not due to sensory acuity reductions operating during cognitive assessment.

Cognitive aging research has documented a strong increase in the covariation between sensory and cognitive functioning with advancing age. In part, this finding may reflect sensory acuity reductions operating during cognitive assessment. To examine this possibility, the authors administered cognitive tasks used in prior studies (e.g., Lindenberger & Baltes, 1994) to middle-aged adults under age-simulation conditions of reduced visual acuity, auditory acuity, or both. Visual acuity was lowered through partial occlusion filters, and auditory acuity through headphone-shaped noise protectors. Acuity manipulations reduced visual acuity and auditory acuity in the speech range to values reaching or approximating old-age acuity levels, respectively, but did not lower cognitive performance relative to control conditions. Results speak against assessment-related sensory acuity accounts of the age-related increase in the connection between sensory and cognitive functioning and underscore the need to explore alternative explanations, including a focus on general aspects of brain aging.

Seeds of wisdom: adolescents' knowledge and judgment about difficult life problems.

The present study examined adolescents' wisdom-related knowledge and judgment with a heterogeneous sample of 146 adolescents (ages 14-20 years) and a comparison sample of 58 young adults (ages 21-37 years). Participants responded to difficult and ill-defined life dilemmas; expert raters evaluated these responses along 5 wisdom criteria. Our findings confirmed that in contrast to adulthood, adolescence is a major period for normative age-graded development in knowledge about difficult life problems. Adolescents performed at lower levels than young adults but also demonstrated substantial age increments in performance. As expected, adolescents' performance varied as a function of criterion and gender. These results hold implications for research on adolescent development and for the development of wisdom-related knowledge and judgment.

Short-term fluctuations in elderly people's sensorimotor functioning predict text and spatial memory performance: The Macarthur Successful Aging Studies.

BACKGROUND: While age-related increases of between-person variability in a variety of cognitive measures are commonly reported in cross-sectional studies, the nature of short-term intraindividual fluctuation in elderly people's performance is relatively unexplored. OBJECTIVE: The goal of the present study is to examine short-term fluctuations in elderly people's sensorimotor functioning and their relations to individual differences in verbal and spatial memory. METHODS: Fluctuations in old adults' (mean = 75.71 years, SD = 6.93 years) sensorimotor performance were investigated by biweekly measurements spanning approximately 7 months. Sensorimotor performance was measured by three walking tasks, including the duration and the number of steps taken to walk a 360-degree circle and to walk 10 feet both at normal and fast pace. Performances of verbal and spatial memory were assessed by weekly measurements of digit memory span, memory for short text and spatial recognition. RESULTS: The magnitude of intraindividual fluctuation in most sensorimotor and memory tasks examined was at least half as great as the level of individual differences across persons. In addition, intraindividual fluctuation in sensorimotor performance is a relatively stable individual attribute, which correlates positively with age and negatively with the levels of sensorimotor, text and spatial memory performance. Although a substantial amount of individual differences in intraindividual fluctuation was shared with mean performance level, variance component and hierarchical regression analyses showed that intraindividual fluctuation in walking steps added significant independent contribution over and above that given by level of performance in predicting text and spatial memory. CONCLUSION: Taking these results together, we suggest that intraindividual fluctuations in elderly people's performance should not be ignored or simply treated as measurement error; rather, they are potentially important empirical variables for understanding sensory and cognitive aging and the nature of intraindividual response variations in general.

Memorizing while walking: increase in dual-task costs from young adulthood to old age.

The dual task of memorizing word lists while walking was predicted to become more difficult with age because balance and gait are in greater need of "attentional resources." Forty-seven young (ages 20-30 years), 45 middle-aged (40-50), and 48 old (60-70) adults were trained to criterion in a mnemonic technique and instructed to walk quickly and accurately on 2 narrow tracks of different path complexity. Then. participants encoded the word lists while sitting, standing, or walking on either track; likewise, speed and accuracy of walking performance were assessed with and without concurrent memory encoding. Dual-task costs increased with age in both domains; relative to young adults, the effect size of the overall increase was 0.98 standard deviation units for middle-aged and 1.47 standard deviation units for old adults. It is argued that sensory and motor aspects of behavior are increasingly in need of cognitive control with advancing age.

Wisdom. A metaheuristic (pragmatic) to orchestrate mind and virtue toward excellence.

The primary focus of this article is on the presentation of wisdom research conducted under the heading of the Berlin wisdom paradigm. Informed by a cultural-historical analysis, wisdom in this paradigm is defined as an expert knowledge system concerning the fundamental pragmatics of life. These include knowledge and judgment about the meaning and conduct of life and the orchestration of human development toward excellence while attending conjointly to personal and collective well-being. Measurement includes think-aloud protocols concerning various problems of life associated with life planning, life management, and life review. Responses are evaluated with reference to a family of 5 criteria: rich factual and procedural knowledge, lifespan contextualism, relativism of values and life priorities, and recognition and management of uncertainty. A series of studies is reported that aim to describe, explain, and optimize wisdom. The authors conclude with a new theoretical perspective that characterizes wisdom as a cognitive and motivational metaheuristic (pragmatic) that organizes and orchestrates knowledge toward human excellence in mind and virtue, both individually and collectively.

[Age and aging as incomplete architecture of human ontogenesis]. / Alter und Altern als unvollendete Architektur der Humanontogenese.

The focus is on the basic biological-genetic and social-cultural architecture of human development across the life span. The starting point is the frame provided by past evolutionary forces. A first conclusion is that for modern times and the relative brevity of the time windows involved in modernity, further change in human functioning is primarily dependent on the evolution of new cultural forms of knowledge rather than evolution-based changes in the human genome. A second conclusion concerns the general architecture of the life course. Three governing lifespan developmental principles coexist. First, because long-term evolutionary selection evince a negative age correlation, genome-based plasticity and biological potential decrease with age. Second, for growth aspects of human development to extend further into the life span, culture-based resources are required at ever increasing levels. Third, because of age-related losses in biological plasticity and negative effects associated with some principles of learning (e.g., negative transfer), the efficiency of culture is reduced as lifespan development unfolds. Joint application of these principles suggests that the lifespan architecture becomes more and more incomplete with age. Three examples are given to illustrate the implications of the lifespan architecture outlined. The first is a general theory of development involving the orchestration of three component processes and their age-related dynamics: Selection, optimization, and compensation. The second example is theory and research on lifespan intelligence that distinguishes between the biology-based mechanics and culture-based pragmatics of intelligence and specifies distinct age gradients for the two categories of intellectual functioning. The third example considers the goal of evolving a positive biological and cultural scenario for the last phase of life (fourth age). Because of the general lifespan architecture outlined, this objective becomes increasingly difficult to achieve. In fact, for other reasons (such as the obsolescence created by rapid technological change) the 21st century can be considered as the century of the permanently incomplete mind. The advent of intervention genetics creates a new scenario with promise and despair. Promise because of the possibility to complete the biological-genetic architecture of the life course through a priori and a posteriori genetic engineering, despair because of a new schism created by the risk of dissociation of the time course of genetic intervention and cultural evolution. For the first time in history, humankind is truly in charge of it's biocultural "natural" destiny.

Lifespan psychology: theory and application to intellectual functioning.

The focus of this review is on theory and research of lifespan (lifespan developmental) psychology. The theoretical analysis integrates evolutionary and ontogenetic perspectives on cultural and human development across several levels of analysis. Specific predictions are advanced dealing with the general architecture of lifespan ontogeny, including its directionality and age-differential allocation of developmental resources into the three major goals of developmental adaptation: growth, maintenance, and regulation of loss. Consistent with this general lifespan architecture, a meta-theory of development is outlined that is based on the orchestrated and adaptive interplay between three processes of behavioral regulation: selection, optimization, and compensation. Finally, these propositions and predictions about the general nature of lifespan development are examined and supported by empirical evidence on the development of cognition and intelligence across the life span.

Self-regulation and school performance: is there optimal level of action-control?

Research on the self-regulatory implications of psychological control suggests that overestimations of one's capabilities may be associated with enhanced performance. We examined this hypothesis in a two-year (three-occasion) longitudinal study of 381 German school children (8-11 years of age). Controlling for gender, grade in school, prior academic achievement, and level of intelligence, we used path analysis to examine the longitudinal relations between overestimations of one's personal agency and subsequent school performance. We expected overestimations of one's agency to facilitate subsequent school performance. Furthermore, we expected that this relationship would be strongest for those with moderate overestimations of their agency. Supporting our first hypothesis, overestimations of one's capabilities were consistently associated with improvements in subsequent school performance. However, our second hypothesis was not supported. The results suggest that overestimating personal agency is one possible mechanism through which one maintains and improves performance.

Selection, optimization, and compensation as strategies of life management: correlations with subjective indicators of successful aging.

The usefulness of self-reported processes of selection, optimization, and compensation (SOC) for predicting on a correlational level the subjective indicators of successful aging was examined. The sample of Berlin residents was a subset of the participants of the Berlin Aging Study. Three domains (marked by 6 variables) served as outcome measures of successful aging: subjective well-being, positive emotions, and absence of feelings of loneliness. Results confirm the central hypothesis of the SOC model: People who reported using SOC-related life-management behaviors (which were unrelated in content to the outcome measures) had higher scores on the 3 indicators of successful aging. The relationships obtained were robust even after controlling for other measures of successful mastery such as personal life investment, neuroticism, extraversion, openness, control beliefs, intelligence, subjective health, or age.

A systemic-wholistic view of psychological functioning in very old age: introduction to a collection of articles from the Berlin Aging Study.

Introduced are articles from the Berlin Aging Study (BASE) that collectively illustrate systemic-wholistic approaches to psychological functioning in old age. A systemic-wholistic perspective aims to elucidate structural and functional interdependencies between domains and to provide an integrative account of individual functioning. The special features of BASE (age range, 70-105 years; heterogeneous sample stratified by age and gender; and multidisciplinary data collection) are suited to this purpose. This article outlines the design of BASE, describes the cross-sectional sample (N = 516: 258 men and 258 women), and reports sample selectivity analyses on 25 criterion variables in which the Pearson-Lawley selection formulas were used. Although the BASE sample is positively biased, it is not restricted in heterogeneity and does not exhibit major differences in patterns of covariation among variables. This finding supports the use of BASE data for the intended systemic-wholistic analyses.

Intellectual functioning in old and very old age: cross-sectional results from the Berlin Aging Study.

This study documents age trends, interrelations, and correlates of intellectual abilities in old and very old age (70-103 years) from the Berlin Aging Study (N = 516). Fourteen tests were used to assess 5 abilities: reasoning, memory, and perceptual speed from the mechanic (broad fluid) domain and knowledge and fluency from the pragmatic (broad crystallized) domain. Intellectual abilities had negative linear age relations, with more pronounced age reductions in mechanic than in pragmatic abilities. Interrelations among intellectual abilities were highly positive and did not follow the mechanic-pragmatic distinction. Sociobiographical indicators were less closely linked to intellectual functioning than sensory-sensorimotor variables, which predicted 59% of the total reliable variance in general intelligence. Results suggest that aging-induced biological factors are a prominent source of individual differences in intelligence in old and very old age.

Profiles of psychological functioning in the old and oldest old.

Cluster analysis was applied to 12 measures of intellectual, personality, self-related, and social functioning collected in the 1st cross-sectional wave of the Berlin Aging Study (BASE; N = 516). Central questions concerned the number, profile desirability (functional status), and the membership of the subgroups obtained. Of the 9 subgroups extracted, 4 reflected different patterns of desirable functioning (47% of the sample), and 5 reflected less desirable functioning (53%). Relative risk of a less desirable profile was 2.5 times higher for the oldest old (85-103 years) than for people between the ages of 70-84 years and was 1.25 times higher for women compared with men. Relationships with education, health, and mortality suggested underlying systemic differences. Consistent with theoretical propositions about a "4th age" and the incomplete architecture of life span development (P.B. Baltes, 1997) the oldest old appear to have a distinct and less desirable psychological profile.

On the incomplete architecture of human ontogeny. Selection, optimization, and compensation as foundation of developmental theory.

Drawing on both evolutionary and ontogenetic perspectives, the basic biological-genetic and social-cultural architecture of human development is outlined. Three principles are involved. First, evolutionary selection pressure predicts a negative age correlation, and therefore, genome-based plasticity and biological potential decrease with age. Second, for growth aspects of human development to extend further into the life span, culture-based resources are required at ever-increasing levels. Third, because of age-related losses in biological plasticity, the efficiency of culture is reduced as life span development unfolds. Joint application of these principles suggests that the life span architecture becomes more and more incomplete with age. Degree of completeness can be defined as the ratio between gains and losses in functioning. Two examples illustrate the implications of the life span architecture proposed. The first is a general theory of development involving the orchestration of 3 component processes: selection, optimization, and compensation. The second considers the task of completing the life course in the sense of achieving a positive balance between gains and losses for all age levels. This goal is increasingly more difficult to attain as human development is extended into advanced old age.

Emergence of a powerful connection between sensory and cognitive functions across the adult life span: a new window to the study of cognitive aging?

Six hundred eighty seven individuals ages 25-103 years were studied cross-sectionally to examine the relationship between measures of sensory functioning (visual and auditory acuity) and intelligence (14 cognitive tasks representing a 5-factor space of psychometric intelligence). As predicted, the average proportion of individual differences in intellectual functioning connected to sensory functioning increased from 11% in adulthood (25-69 years) to 31% in old age (70-103 years). However, the link between fluid intellectual abilities and sensory functioning, albeit of different size, displayed a similarly high connection to age in both age groups. Several explanations are discussed, including a "common cause" hypothesis. In this vein, we argue that the increase in the age-associated link between sensory and intellectual functioning may reflect brain aging and that the search for explanations of cognitive aging phenomena would benefit from attending to factors that are shared between the 2 domains.

Children's action-control beliefs about school performance: how do American children compare with German and Russian children?

Using the revised Control, Agency, and Means-ends Interview (T. D. Little, G. Oettingen, & P. B. Baltes, 1995), we compared American children's (Grades 2-6) action-control beliefs about school performance with those of German and Russian children (Los Angeles, n = 657; East Berlin, n = 313; West Berlin, n = 517; Moscow, n = 541). Although we found pronounced cross-setting similarities in the children's everyday causality beliefs about what factors produce school performance, we obtained consistent cross-setting differences in (a) the mean levels of the children's personal agency and control expectancy and (b) the correlational magnitudes between these beliefs and actual school performance. Notably, the American children were at the extremes of the cross-national distributions: (a) they had the highest mean levels of personal agency and control expectancy but (b) the lowest beliefs-performance correlations. Such outcomes indicate that the low beliefs-performance correlations that are frequently obtained in American research appear to be specific to American settings.

People nominated as wise: a comparative study of wisdom-related knowledge.

This study examined whether our conception of wisdom has a psychological bias, by focusing on a group of distinguished individuals nominated as being wise. The comparison groups included older clinical psychologists and highly educated old and young control groups. Wisdom-related knowledge was assessed by 2 tasks and evaluated with a set of 5 wisdom criteria. First, old wisdom nominees performed as well as clinical psychologists who in past research had shown the highest levels of performance. Second, wisdom nominees excelled in the task of existential life management and the criterion of value relativism. Third, up to age 80, older adults performed as well as younger adults. If there is a psychological bias to our conception of wisdom, this does not prevent nonpsychologists from being among the top performers.

[Cognitive capacity in advanced age: initial results of the Berlin Aging Study]. / Kognitive Leistungsfähigkeit im hohen Alter: Erste Ergebnisse aus der Berliner Altersstudie.

This study reports data on intellectual functioning in old and very old age from the Berlin Aging Study (N = 516; age range = 70-103 years; mean age = 85 years). A psychometric battery of 14 tests was used to assess five cognitive abilities: reasoning, memory, and perceptual speed from the broad fluid-mechanical as well as knowledge and fluency from the broad crystallized-pragmatic domains. Cognitive abilities had a negative linear relationship with age, with more pronounced age-based reductions in fluid-mechanical than crystallized-pragmatic abilities. At the same time, ability intercorrelations formed a highly positive manifold, and did not follow the fluid-crystallized distinction. Interindividual variability was of about equal magnitude across the entire age range studied. There was, however, no evidence for substantial sex differences. As to origins of individual differences, indicators of sensory and sensorimotor functioning were more powerful predictors of intellectual functioning than cultural-biographical variables, and the two sets of predictors were, consistent with theoretical expectations, differentially related to measures of fluid-mechanical (perceptual speed) and crystallized pragmatic (knowledge) functioning. Results, in general indicative of sizeable and general losses with age, are consistent with the view that aging-induced biological influences are a prominent source of individual differences in intellectual functioning in old and very old age. Longitudinal follow-ups are underway to examine the role of cohort effects, selective mortality, and interindividual differences in change trajectories.

Occupational settings facilitating wisdom-related knowledge: the sample case of clinical psychologists.

Wisdom can be defined as expert knowledge in the fundamental pragmatics of life. Examined here is whether clinical practice may facilitate access to and acquisition of such knowledge. Spontaneous think-aloud responses to 2 wisdom-related dilemmas from young (M = 32 years) and older (M = 70 years) clinicians were compared with responses obtained from other professionals. Raters judged clinicians' responses as higher on 5 criteria of wisdom: factual knowledge, procedural knowledge, life-span contextualism, value relativism, and management of uncertainty. Contrary to most studies of cognitive aging, young and older adults did not differ. Rather, each age-cohort group received highest ratings when responding to a life dilemma matched to their own life phase. Discussed is the application of a wisdom framework to assessing therapeutic treatment goals and therapist interventions as well as global changes in client's beliefs during therapy.