Chapter Eight Expertise and Aging: Life in the Lab

Summary Why do old adults perform so poorly with typical laboratory tasks, yet do so well in professional and everyday performance? Further, why is there such a discrepancy between the ages at which peak performances are obtained in sports versus intellectual spheres? We explore the age/skill tradeoff, and suggest how “software”, knowledge acquisition, can compensate for age-related declines in “hardware”, cognitive architecture. We review research on several intellectual domains, emphasizing work conducted in chess and bridge, and contrast those studies with ones dealing with more physically demanding domains, typing and athletic performance. We outline the boundary conditions for compensation within each domain, and discuss the implications for theories of compensation.

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