Categories › Age & life-stage
Category
Age & life-stage
Different trajectories of cognition, motivation, physiology, selection, and adaptation across the lifespan.
Terms
Fluid versus crystallized intelligenceThe distinction between capacities used for novel problem solving and accumulated knowledge; their average life-course trajectories differ.
Processing-speed hypothesisThe proposal that age-related slowing in basic processing can constrain performance on more complex cognitive tasks.
Cognitive reserveDifferences in resilience of cognitive functioning despite aging or pathology, often linked to lifetime experience and compensatory capacity.
Brain maintenancePreservation of neural characteristics associated with reduced age-related decline rather than compensation after decline occurs.
CompensationUse or recruitment of alternative strategies or processes to maintain performance despite losses elsewhere.
Super-agingUnusually preserved cognition in later life, used to study heterogeneity rather than assuming a uniform aging trajectory.
Terminal declineAcceleration of some cognitive changes as death approaches, distinguished from change attributable simply to chronological age.
Age–period–cohort problemThe difficulty of separating effects of biological aging from historical period effects and differences between birth cohorts.
Selective survivalBias arising because older samples disproportionately contain people who survived earlier health, environmental, and social risks.
Socioemotional selectivityA theory that motivational priorities shift as perceived remaining time becomes more limited.
Positivity effectA tendency reported in some aging research for attention or memory to shift relatively toward positive versus negative information.
Life-course accumulationThe idea that later outcomes reflect accumulated exposures and trajectories over decades rather than current age alone.
Sensitive / critical periodA developmental window in which the same exposure can have different consequences than it would outside that window.
Maturation versus senescenceThe distinction between developmental gain processes and later-life loss processes rather than treating age as one homogeneous mechanism.
Chronological versus biological ageThe distinction between years lived and physiological state or accumulated biological change.
Research trail
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