Life cycle patterns of cognitive performance over the long run

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Human Development
• Behavioral Economics

Background:

• Understanding life-cycle performance patterns in cognitively demanding tasks over time is challenging due to measurement difficulties.
• Previous research lacked reliable, comparable metrics for individual performance across different ages and historical periods.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the dynamics of cognitive performance life-cycle patterns over the past 125 years.
• To analyze how these age-related performance patterns have evolved across different birth cohorts.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of over 24,000 professional chess games, evaluating move-by-move performance against an objective chess engine benchmark.
• Utilizing repeated observations of the same individuals to distinguish age patterns from individual variation and cohort effects.

Main Results:

• Documented a consistent hump-shaped performance profile across the life cycle.
• Observed a long-run shift in peak performance towards younger ages, primarily driven by cohort effects.

Conclusions:

• The observed shift in cognitive performance timing is linked to cohort effects, suggesting increased experience from factors like digitization in education and training.
• This study provides a novel, objective method for measuring long-term cognitive performance dynamics.