Gender, individual and aging differences

• Stable patterns of performance that differ qualitatively and/or quantitively across individuals

  • Intelligence
  • Expert vs novice
  • Bilingualism
• Intelligence


  • Bell curve vs 6 different intelligences
• Expert vs novice (chess example)

  1. Shown a chess board with multiple pieces arranged on it for 5 seconds

  2. Asked to remake the board from memory

  3. Experts perform much better than novices when pieces are in meaningful positions

  4. Experts no longer have an advantage when pieces are randomly scattered
• Chunking


  Increase memory span when information is meaningful
• Bilinguals


  • Better ability to attend selectively to relevant information, and ignore competing and distracting info
  • Better able to distinguish both the rat and the man in the ambiguous drawing compared to monolinguals
• Preserved functions with aging

  • Semantic memory
  • Implicit memory
• Declining functions with aging

  • Greater decline in memory processes associated with the frontal lobe
  • Episodic memory: encoding deficit, retrieval deficit, source memory deficit
  • General slowing on processing speed
  • Less effective inhibition processes
  • Reduced availability of attentional resources
• HAROLD


  Hemispheric Asymmetry Reduction in Older Adults
• Gender differences


  • Mental rotation tasks: males greatly outperform females
  • Object location Change/ Visual tasks: females outperform males
  • Verbal Skills: females show earlier onset of fluency, Verbal memory and fluency advantages carried on into adult hood
  • Vocabulary and verbal reasoning show no gender differences
• Women's brains


  • Less lateralized than men's
  • Tasks more spread out through brain
  • Show better/quicker recovery to brain injury (specifically in language)
• Men's brains


  • Highly specialized in undertaking certain processes in specific areas