Intelligence and Age

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Intelligence has been commonly thought to decline as we get older, however this is a flawed belief. Countless individuals will argue that there are various cognitive processes that are associated with changes in the brain that do deteriorate with time, however there are also other brain areas that increase their activity in older age. I believe a person’s ability to perform certain tasks may become slower as they get older, but this doesn’t automatically mean that they are cognitively getting less intelligent. There are numerous ways in which intelligence can be defined, although it is commonly defined as general cognitive skills, this means that it is a mental ability involved in the capacity of learning, reasoning, perceiving relationships and analogies, understanding, facts, meanings, etc. (Dictionary definition). However Raymond Cattell (1963) argued that ‘intelligence does not generally consist of only cognitive performance’. Cattell and Horns theory developed in 1966 and emphasises that intelligence is composed of a number of different abilities that interrelate to form the broad term of intelligence. The main two factors are crystallised and Fluid intelligence.
Several people have developed the idea that as a person gets older their intelligence will decrease, this assumption has been developed through the idea that as an individual’s age increases, their fluid intelligence skills deteriorates. However there is more to intelligence than just fluid intelligence, crystallised intelligence works in much the same way except in reverse, with the older generation having more crystallised intelligence than younger people in their teenage years. Crystallized intelligence consists of acquired skills and knowledge which comes from ...

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...n the 17th march 2014. http://psych.answers.com/research-methods/defining-and-providing-examples-of-fluid-intelligence Horn, J. L., & Cattell, R. B. (1967). ‘Age differences in fluid and crystallized intelligence’. Acta Psychological, 26, 107-129.

Knapton, S 2014, ‘Brains of elderly slow because they know so much’ Telegraph Media Group, published in the Journal of Topics in Cognitive Science, viewed on the 22nd of march 2014 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10584927/Brains-of-elderly-slow-because-they-know-so-much.html Williams, Y 2003, ‘Retrieval Cues: Definition, Examples & Quiz’ Education portal, Veiwed on the 22nd of march 2014 http://education-portal.com/academy/lesson/retrieval-cues-definition-examples-quiz.html#lesson 2013, ‘Dementia’ Australian institute of health and welfare, viewed on the 26th of march
http://www.aihw.gov.au/dementia/

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