Maintaining Competencies Despite Ageing

Do you know where my glasses are?

There’s the guy who used to live across the street from us when we were in Philadelphia.  What was his name? Jack? Jim? What was it?

Can you button my cuff for me?

Anyone could need assistance similar to what is implied above.  But such needs become more frequent as we age.  Are age-related declines inevitable?  How deep will they be? 

Concerns about ageing and competence are very common in 21st Century America where from 1950 to 2010, the age cohort 65 and over increased 213% whereas 15- to 64-year-olds grew only 105%, and the under 15 population, only 45% ( http://www.pewglobal.org/), 

Psychological research provides standard textbook-type answers to age-related decline, asserting, for instance, that "fluid" intelligence is most vulnerable and "crystalized" intelligence is less.  The former refers to capabilities that require more abstraction, novelty, dexterity, and speed, and the latter, more knowledge and experience, such as an extensive vocabulary, corpus of factual details, or armamentarium of well-practiced strategies.

For good reasons, age-related decline has been a frequent subject of scientific investigation. Let’s consider one.

Nemanja Vaci, Bartosz Gula, and Merim Bilalić (2015) investigated ageing though the lens of chess competence by scrutinizing a database containing records of players from beginner to world class.  They subdivided the course of chess competence into three phases: from start of playing to peak performance, from peak to postpeak decline, and from post peak decline to stabilization.  At first glance it was surprising to find that the more expert players’ declines tended to occur earlier than did the declines of less capable ones.  On the other hand, as anticipated, the declines of the more expert ones slowed more quickly than did the declines of the less capable ones.  Not surprisingly, regardless of expertise level, persons who played in the most tournaments decline the slowest and the shallowest.

Why the results?  I have some thoughts and implications for you to consider.  Let's start by having you imagine that you know little about chess and considering some questions from that perspective.

Am I smart enough to learn how to play chess?

Am I willing to put forth the time to become very skillful at it?

Am I good enough to play in tournaments?

Am  I able to tolerate playing against tournament competitors who are very skillful?

The aforementioned questions pertain to your self-confidence, priorities, time on task, determination, and willingness to take risks.  And all of those attributes will be critical for your learning, developing, maintaining competencies, and reaching any goal.  You certainly need self-confidence, priorities, time on task, determination, and willingness to take risks to achieve a healthful lifestyle no less than you do to become chess proficient.

And now, final implications from the chess study of Nemanja Vaci.  I infer that the more expert players declined earlier than less capable ones because the experts high level functioning required much more fluid intelligence skills – the skills most sensitive to ageing - than did their less capable counterparts.  Relatedly, the decline of the former group of chess players probably slowed more quickly because they had “overlearned” chess (Overlearning is a process by which one practices a new skill with such focus and frequency that the skill become habitual, requiring much less conscious effort than otherwise warranted.) to the point that they retained considerable chess-relevant fluid intellectual skills, eventually managing to compensate well for the fluidity that they had lost.  And, of course, the expert and less capable chess players who played in the most tournaments decline slowest and shallowest simply because the old adage of “use it or lose it” undeniably is true.

Repeating my essential point then: To achieve a healthful lifestyle, like an expert chess player, you must work continually toward enhancing your self-confidence, priorities, time on task, determination, and willingness to take health-promoting risks.  Life is the ultimate chess game. Experts know the rules and strategies.  And they know how to execute over the long term. 

Reference

Vaci, N.,  Gula, B. &; Bilalić, M. (2015).   Is age really cruel to experts?  Compensatory effects of activity.  Psychology and Aging, 30, 4, 740-754.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pag0000056