12.4 Selective Gains and Losses

Aging neurons, cultural pressures, historical conditions, and past schooling all affect adult cognition, as just reviewed. None of these is under direct individual control. However, adults can choose what abilities to nurture. For example, many adults use calculators instead of paper-and-pencil (or mental) calculations to do math. If adults threw out their calculators, would their math skills improve? Probably. But most adults would not choose to do so.

Optimization with Compensation

Paul and Margret Baltes (1990) developed a theory, called selective optimization with compensation, to describe the general process of systematic function (P. B. Baltes, 2003) as older adults maintain a balance in their lives. The idea is that people seek to optimize their development, looking for the best ways to compensate for losses and to become more proficient at activities they want to perform well.

Selective optimization helps explain the variations in intellectual abilities just reviewed. As other research has found, when older adults are motivated to do well, few age-related deficits are apparent. However, compared with younger adults, older adults are typically less motivated to put forth their best effort when the task at hand is not particularly engaging (Hess et al., 2009). Often people prefer the easy way over the way that will challenge their intellect.

Specialized LearningSpecialization works as follows. Suppose a man who was interested in one area of the world noticed that aging affected his vision and memory. He might compensate by buying reading glasses, increasing the type size on his computer, and keeping a file or notebook for whatever he reads about that area, sometimes rereading it. He might be selective, skipping over most of the news about other parts of the world. In that way, he would still know more about his particular specialty (optimization) than anyone else.

Selective optimization with compensation may be particularly crucial on the job, as older workers notice that some tasks now take longer or are more difficult for them to do. If they use compensation strategies, they are more likely to see opportunities for continued growth and improvement, making the job more interesting to them (Zacher & Frese, 2011).

An example that may be familiar to everyone is multi-tasking, which becomes more difficult with every passing decade (Reuter-Lorenz & Sylvester, 2005). “I can’t do everything at once” is more often said by adults than by teenagers because adults have learned to be selective, compensating for slower thinking by concentrating on one task at a time. Resources—of the brain as well as material resources—may be increasingly limited with age, but compensation allows optimal functioning (Freund, 2008).

Selective optimization with compensation applies to every aspect of life, from choosing friends to playing baseball. Each adult seeks to maximize gains and minimize losses, choosing to practise some abilities and ignore others. Choices are critical because every ability can be enhanced or diminished, depending on how, when, and why a person uses it. It is possible to “teach an old dog new tricks,” but adults need to choose and practise the tricks.

Particularly relevant may be the selection of cognitive abilities. As Baltes and Baltes (1990) explain, selective optimization means that each person optimizes some intellectual abilities and neglects others. If the ignored abilities are the ones measured by IQ tests, then IQ scores fall. This would occur even though other abilities increase.

Selection and ActionSelective optimization is the probable explanation for the continued intellectual ability of adults. However, the concept is most easily demonstrated by brain activity that involves the motor system, not disembodied thinking (Beilock, 2010). For example, experienced typists scan more letters at a time to compensate for slower finger action, chefs prepare more foods in advance to avoid having multiple pots on the stove at once, and servers in restaurants use downtime to clear tables and prepare for new customers. Each of these occupations has been studied, with efficiency more apparent in experienced workers because of compensatory moves.

The most frequently studied action-based compensation is that of professional sports players, probably because optimal performance is worth millions (Ajemian et al., 2010). Athletes need to practise and warm up to activate the neurological connections in their brains that allow the quick and precise movements to hit a baseball, throw a basketball, hit a hockey puck, and so on. If they are not selective in their neurological activity and they allow interference from memory or emotion, they risk failure.

Thus, when star athletes are asked the secret of their success, they often do not know or remember because memory and emotion must shut down in order for professional expertise to focus solely on performance. According to a cognitive psychologist, “That’s why they usually thank God or their moms. They don’t know what they did, so they don’t know what else to say” (Beilock, quoted in Bascom, 2012).

Expert Cognition

Everyone can develop expertise, specializing in activities that are personally meaningful—whether that be car repair, gourmet cooking, illness diagnosis, or fly fishing. As people develop expertise in some areas, they pay less attention to others. For example, some adults develop expertise in cooking rather than gardening, or in music versus dance, or in one style of music over another.

Culture and context guide all of us in selecting areas of expertise. Many adults born 60 years ago are much better than more recent cohorts at writing letters with distinctive but legible handwriting. Because of their childhood culture, they selected and practised penmanship, became expert in it, and maintained that expertise. On the other hand, younger adults grew up with various technological devices; some older adults are still cautious in programming everything from smart phones to video screens.

Experts, as cognitive scientists define them, are not necessarily those with rare and outstanding proficiency. Although sometimes the term expert connotes an extraordinary genius, to researchers it means more—and less—than that. An expert is notably more accomplished, proficient, and knowledgeable in a particular skill, topic, or task than the average person (Charness & Krampe, 2008; Ericsson, 2009).

Expertise is not innate, nor does it always correlate with basic abilities (such as the five abilities measured in the Seattle Longitudinal Study). However, genetic predispositions may incline a person to be better at some skills than others. Expert language interpreters, for instance, might have been born with brain capacity to understand dialect, but they also need years of training and experience to become expert (Golestani et al., 2011).

Experts All Every adult is an expert. Shown here (clockwise from top left): a Borek (a Turkish delicacy) baker at the market, a connoisseur evaluating the bouquet of a costly red wine, a musician playing the didgeridoo, and a professor in her biology lab. Most of us would be inept and bewildered in those roles. Students likely also know a great deal about some things that are unfamiliar to others—electronic music, artistic makeup, Italian cuisine, professional baseball, and more.

DALLAS STRIBLEY/LONELY PLANET IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES
EDVARD MARCH/CORBIS
MARILYNN K. YEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
HERBERT SPICHTINGER/CORBIS

An expert is not simply someone who knows more about something, or who has done it often. At a certain tipping point, accumulated knowledge, practice, and experience become transformative, changing the brain, putting the expert in a different league (Ericsson, 2009; Wan et al., 2011). The quality as well as the quantity of cognition is advanced. Expert thought is: (1) intuitive, (2) automatic, (3) strategic, and (4) flexible, as we now describe.

Intuitive Novices follow formal procedures and rules. Experts rely more on their past experiences and on immediate contexts. Their actions are therefore more intuitive and less stereotypic. The role of experience and intuition is evident, for example, during surgery. Outsiders might think medicine is straightforward, but experts understand the reality:

In one study, many surgeons saw the same videotape of a gallbladder operation and were asked to talk about it. The experienced surgeons anticipated and described problems twice as often as did the residents (who had also removed gallbladders, just not as many) (Dominguez, 2001). Data on physicians indicate that the single most important question to ask a surgeon is, “How often have you performed this operation?” The novice, even with the best, most recent training, is less skilled than the expert.

Another study found that the number of years since a doctor was in medical school correlated negatively with proficiency (Choudhry et al., 2005). Obviously, when experience leads to habits that should change because of more recent advances, then simply having done something the same old way a thousand times does not mean that the task is performed better than it is by someone who uses a better technique, learned recently and performed only 50 times. Intuition arises from practice, but practice does not always lead to intuition.

A different experiment that studied the relationship between expertise and intuition centred on predicting winners of several soccer matches, either instantly or after two minutes. College students who were avid fans made more accurate predictions when they had two minutes of unconscious thought (they were required to perform difficult math calculations and then give their answer) compared with when they had two minutes to mull over their choice (see Figure 12.5). In this, intuition trumped conscious thought. When given the same task, college students who didn’t care much about soccer (the non-experts) did worse overall, as expected, but the surprising result is that intuition didn’t help at all: They did worst of all when they had two minutes of the same math problems that helped the experts (Dijksterhuis et al., 2009).

FIGURE 12.5 If You Don’t Know, Don’t Think! Undergraduates at the University of Amsterdam were asked to predict winners of four World Cup soccer matches in one of three conditions: (1) immediate—as soon as they saw the names of the nations that were competing in each of the contests, (2) conscious—after thinking for two minutes about their answers, and (3) unconscious—after two minutes of solving distracting math tasks. The experts were better at predicting winners after unconscious processing, but the non-experts became less accurate when they thought about their answers, either consciously or unconsciously.

Source: Dijksterhuis et al., 2009.

This experiment suggests that intuition, here occurring unconsciously, helps experts but not non-experts. The latter gain nothing from thinking it over, either consciously or not.

AutomaticAutomatic processing is thought to be a crucial reason why expert chess and Go (a Chinese board game that requires the use of strategy) players are much better at the game than are novices. They see a configuration of game pieces and automatically encode it as a whole, rather than analyzing it bit by bit.

A study of expert chess players (aged 17 to 81) found minor age-related declines, but expertise was much more important than age. This was particularly apparent for speedy recognition that the king was threatened: Older experts did it almost as quickly (within a fraction of a second) as younger experts, despite far steeper, age-related declines on standard tests of memory and speed (Jastrzembski et al., 2006).

Many elements of expert performance are automatic. The complex action and thought required for performance have become routine, making it appear that most aspects of the task are performed instinctively. Experts process incoming information more quickly and analyze it more efficiently than do non-experts. They then act in well-rehearsed ways that make their efforts appear unconscious.

In fact, some automatic actions are no longer accessible to the conscious mind. For example, adults are much better at tying their shoelaces than children are (adults can do it in the dark), but they are much worse at describing how they do it (McLeod et al., 2005). When experts think, they engage in automatic weighting of various non-verbalized factors (Dijksterhuis et al., 2009). This is apparent if you are an experienced driver and have attempted to teach someone else to drive. Excellent drivers who are inexperienced instructors find it hard to recognize or verbalize things that have become automatic—such as noticing pedestrians and cyclists on the far side of the road, or feeling the car shift gears as it heads up an incline, or hearing the tires lose traction on a bit of sand. Yet such factors differentiate the expert from the novice.

Checkmate Automatic processing has allowed this young woman (right) to develop expertise in chess at a very young age. A 12-year-old chess prodigy, she is seen here challenging older players on Main Street, in Vancouver.

JSMIMAGES/ALAMY

This may explain why, despite powerful motivation, quicker reactions, and better vision, teenagers have far more car accidents than middle-aged drivers do. Sometimes teenage drivers deliberately take risks (speeding, running a red light, etc.), but more often they simply misjudge and misperceive conditions that a more experienced driver would automatically notice.

Automaticity is particularly crucial if a person’s conscious mind is focused on something else, which is why many regions place restrictions on the number and age of passengers teen drivers are allowed to drive with (Zernike, 2012). Having passengers in the vehicle can be distracting, especially for new drivers. By contrast, adult drivers automatically ignore passengers when their unconscious alert system signals that focused attention is needed.

The relationship among expertise, age, and automaticity is not straightforward. Time is only one of the essential requirements for expertise. Not everyone becomes an expert over time (depending on the task), but everyone needs months—or even years—of deliberate practice to develop expertise (Ericsson et al., 2006).

Some researchers think practice must be extensive—several hours a day for at least 10 years (Charness et al., 1996; Ericsson, 1996)—but that may be true in only some areas, not all. Circumstances, training, talent, ability, practice, and age all affect expertise, which means that experts in one specific field are often quite inexpert in other areas.

StrategicThe third characteristic of experts is that they have more and better strategies, especially when problems are unexpected (Ormerod, 2005). Indeed, strategy may be the most crucial difference between a skilled person and an unskilled one. Expert chess players not only have general strategies for winning, but they also have specific plans for the possibilities after a move—that is their specialty (Bilalic et al., 2009).

Similarly, a strategy used by expert team leaders in the military and in civilian life is ongoing communication and reminders, especially during slow times. Consequently, when stress builds, no team member misinterprets the rehearsed plans, commands, and requirements. You have likely witnessed the same phenomenon in expert professors: They put well-developed strategies in place during the early weeks to avoid problems later on.

An intriguing study of age and strategy in job effectiveness comes from an occupation most everyone is familiar with: driving a taxi. In major cities, taxi drivers must find the best route (factoring in traffic, construction, time of day, and many other details), all while knowing where new passengers are likely to be found, as well as how to relate to customers, some of whom might want to chat, others not.

Research in London, England—where taxi drivers have to learn the layout of 25 000 streets and the locations of thousands of places of interest, and pass stringent examinations (Woollett et al., 2009)—found not only that the drivers became more expert with time, but also that their brains adjusted to the need for particular knowledge. In fact, some regions of English taxi drivers’ brains (areas thought to help with spatial representation) were more extensive and active than those of an average person (Woollett et al., 2009). On ordinary IQ tests, their scores were typical, but in navigating London, expertise was apparent. Other studies also show that people become more expert, and that their brains adapt, as they practise various skills (Park & Reuter-Lorenz, 2009).

Of course, strategies themselves need to be updated as situations change—and no chess game, or battle, or class is exactly like another. The monthly fire drill required by some schools, the standard lecture given by some professors, and the routine safety instructions read by airline attendants before takeoff become less effective than when they were first used. People tune them out.

In one study, pilots and non-pilots listened to air traffic control messages that described a flight path while referring to a chart of the airspace. They read back (or repeated) each message and then answered a question about the route. If allowed to take notes while listening to the messages, pilots’ read-back proficiency did not decline with age, as it did for non-pilots. In fact, the researchers found no differences in the read-back proficiency among pilots of three age groups: 22 to 40, 50 to 59, and 60 to 76. However, if not allowed to take notes, the accuracy of the read-backs declined with age, for both pilots and non-pilots (Morrow et al., 2003). For pilots, then, note-taking was a strategy that compensated for age.

This does not mean, of course, that strategy always overcomes age deficits. In another study of pilots (aged 19 to 79) conducted with a flight simulator, the decision of whether to land in the fog involved more risk with increasing age, not the other way around. Older adult pilots had some strengths—they were quicker to begin necessary actions needed for a safe landing in difficult weather—but the older pilots had slower processing skills. When confronted with many indicators of weather and flight, they were less skilled than their younger colleagues at the necessary split-second judgments required in this simulation (Kennedy et al., 2010).

Flexible Expert Although there are many things to pay attention to this 911 operator in Chatham-Kent Police headquarters in Ontario needs to be flexible in her thinking to accommodate each caller’s physical and emotional situation.

DIANA MARTIN/CHATHAM DAILY NEWS/QMI AGENCY

FlexibleFinally, perhaps because they are intuitive, automatic, and strategic thinkers, experts are also more flexible. The expert artist, musician, or scientist is creative and curious, deliberately experimenting, enjoying the challenge when things do not go according to plan (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996).

Consider the expert surgeon who takes the most complex cases and prefers unusual patients over typical ones because operating on them might bring sudden, unexpected complications. Compared with the novice, the expert surgeon is not only more likely to notice telltale signs (an unexpected lesion, an oddly shaped organ, a rise or drop in a vital sign) that may signal a problem, but is also more flexible and more willing to deviate from standard textbook procedures if those procedures prove ineffective (Patel et al., 1999).

Similarly, experts in all walks of life adapt to individual cases and exceptions—like an expert chef who adjusts ingredients, temperature, technique, and timing as a dish develops, tasting to see if a little more ginger is needed, seldom following a recipe exactly. Standards are high: Some chefs throw food in the garbage rather than serve a dish that many people would happily eat. Expert chess players, auto mechanics, and violinists are similarly aware of nuances that might escape the novice.

Jenny, Again

The research on expertise focuses on job-related learning, but the most important aspect of adult life may be responding to other people—especially children and partners. Years of experience in human relationships may sometimes make adults more intuitive, automatic, strategic, and flexible. For example, many parents find themselves less anxious about their second or third baby than their first, and grandparents may be more responsive and patient with children than they were as parents.

A dispassionate analysis of Jenny’s situation, from this chapter’s opening story, would conclude that another baby—with no marriage, no job, and an apartment in the south Bronx—would doom her to poor health, poor prospects, and a depressing life. This is not a stereotype: The data show that lifelong poverty is the usual future for low-income mothers who have another child, out-of-wedlock, with another man.

But statistics do not reflect Jenny’s intelligence, creativity, and practical expertise. She already knew how to access social support, evident by her seeking help. She was not daunted by her poverty; remember, she found many free activities for her children to enjoy, including sending them on vacation in the country. She was exceptional, but not unique: Many low-income people overcome the potential stressors of poverty (Chen & Miller, 2012).

Jenny used her knowledge well. She asked Billy, the father of the child, to be tested for sickle-cell anemia (results were negative), and she knew she should be honest with him. She told him she would have the baby, which was not his choice but one he admired. She continued to encourage her children in public school and established friendships with some of their teachers, who in turn gave them special attention.

After she had the baby (a healthy, full-term girl), she interviewed for a city job tutoring children in her home; that way, she could earn money while caring for her newborn. I brought baby clothes to her apartment one day and noticed that her framed Bronx Community College associate’s degree diploma wasn’t displayed anywhere; she explained that she took it off the wall, fearing that the job agency might think she was overqualified. That was expertise: She got the tutoring job.

When her baby was a little older, Jenny headed back to college, earning her BA on a full scholarship. Her professors recognized her intelligence: She was chosen to give the student speech at graduation. She then found work as a receptionist in a city hospital, a job that provided daycare and health benefits. That allowed her to move her family to a better neighbourhood of the Bronx.

Billy would sometimes visit Jenny and his daughter. His wife became suspicious and hired a detective to follow him—and then gave him an ultimatum: Stop seeing Jenny or obtain a divorce. At that point, it was very obvious that Jenny had some insight into human relations that I did not recognize in my office years earlier—because Billy chose divorce and then married her. Within a few years, Jenny, Billy, and the children moved to Florida, where she got a master’s degree (she phoned me to say she was assigned my textbook to read) and then a professional job in the school system.

The last time I saw her, I learned that she bikes, swims, and gardens every day. I met her son: He had earned a PhD in psychology, and both her daughters are also college graduates.

Not everyone becomes an expert in human relations. But one lesson from this chapter is that health, intelligence, and even wisdom may improve over the years of adulthood. As further explained in Chapter 13, adult choices made, and relationships tended, make a difference—true for Jenny and for us all.