ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Life cycle patterns of cognitive performance over the long run.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Dietary Flavonoids and Human Cognition: A Meta-Analysis.Molecular nutrition & food research · 2022Pooled it
- Speed and quality of complex strategic decisions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Computers and chess masters: The role of AI in transforming elite human performance.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2026Article
- Age-related changes in performance in memory athletes.GeroScience · 2026Article
- Different exploration strategies along the autism spectrum: diverging effects of autism diagnosis and autism traits.Molecular autism · 2025Article
- Assessing willingness and preference for body scan practices in ADHD: a survey study.BMC complementary medicine and therapies · 2025Article
- The Regulation of Cellular Senescence in Cancer.Biomolecules · 2025Review
- Posture control characteristics of different age groups in China based on BertecFrontiers in neurology · 2025Article
- Psychometric properties of the Cognitive Functioning Self-Assessment Scale in community-dwelling adults: A cross-sectional online survey.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- The effect of masks on cognitive performance.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Hybrid social learning in human-algorithm cultural transmission.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2022Article
- Online education at the medical School of Tongji University during the COVID-19 pandemic: a cross-sectional study.BMC medical education · 2021Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Little is known about how the age pattern in individual performance in cognitively demanding tasks changed over the past century. The main difficulty for measuring such life cycle performance patterns and their dynamics over time is related to the construction of a reliable measure that is comparable across individuals and over time and not affected by changes in technology or other environmental factors. This study presents evidence for the dynamics of life cycle patterns of cognitive performance over the past 125 y based on an analysis of data from professional chess tournaments. Individual move-by-move performance in more than 24,000 games is evaluated relative to an objective benchmark that is based on the respective optimal move suggested by a chess engine. This provides a precise and comparable measurement of individual performance for the same individual at different ages over long periods of time, exploiting the advantage of a strictly comparable task and a comparison with an identical performance benchmark. Repeated observations for the same individuals allow disentangling age patterns from idiosyncratic variation and analyzing how age patterns change over time and across birth cohorts. The findings document a hump-shaped performance profile over the life cycle and a long-run shift in the profile toward younger ages that is associated with cohort effects rather than period effects. This shift can be rationalized by greater experience, which is potentially a consequence of changes in education and training facilities related to digitization.
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