EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Mental speed is high until age 60 as revealed by analysis of over a million participants

Mischa Krause (), Stefan T. Radev () and Andreas Voss
Additional contact information
Mischa Krause: Heidelberg University
Stefan T. Radev: Heidelberg University
Andreas Voss: Heidelberg University

Nature Human Behaviour, 2022, vol. 6, issue 5, 700-708

Abstract: Abstract Response speeds in simple decision-making tasks begin to decline from early and middle adulthood. However, response times are not pure measures of mental speed but instead represent the sum of multiple processes. Here we apply a Bayesian diffusion model to extract interpretable cognitive components from raw response time data. We apply our model to cross-sectional data from 1.2 million participants to examine age differences in cognitive parameters. To efficiently parse this large dataset, we apply a Bayesian inference method for efficient parameter estimation using specialized neural networks. Our results indicate that response time slowing begins as early as age 20, but this slowing was attributable to increases in decision caution and to slower non-decisional processes, rather than to differences in mental speed. Slowing of mental speed was observed only after approximately age 60. Our research thus challenges widespread beliefs about the relationship between age and mental speed.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01282-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nathum:v:6:y:2022:i:5:d:10.1038_s41562-021-01282-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-021-01282-7

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Human Behaviour is currently edited by Stavroula Kousta

More articles in Nature Human Behaviour from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:nat:nathum:v:6:y:2022:i:5:d:10.1038_s41562-021-01282-7