Cognitive Changes in Adulthood

Abstract

Cognitive changes during childhood have a specific set of formal "morphogenetic" properties that presumably stem from the biological-maturational growth process underlying these changes: Thus, childhood cognitive modifications are largely inevitable, momentous, directional, uniform, and irreversible. No such underlying process constrains and directs adult cognitive changes, and hence their morphogenetic properties should be quite different from those that obtain during childhood. The most important adult cognitive changes are probably the result of life experiences, and would for the most part be expected to lack the across-subjects uniformity that characterizes the child's intellectual growth. It is possible that there might be some experience-based adult changes that do meet the uniformity criterion, but the identification of such changes has scarcely begun.