Understanding Cognition in Middle Adulthood

Do you feel just like you did when you were 20? Are you as mentally nimble? Are your intuitions better or worse? How have the years (or perhaps decades) of experience affected the way you make decisions about whether to exercise or eat healthily or how much to save for retirement? While few would doubt that they had changed during their adult life, the surprising working assumption in Psychology is that our thinking and decision-making abilities reach a plateau after the turmoil of adolescence and stay at about the same level, until we experience a relatively rapid decline in our post-retirement years. Our project will explore this supposed "plateau" in thinking capacity by testing predictions about which kinds of ability should improve or decline across five decades of adult life. This project could potentially transform current understanding of development across the lifespan and help develop a much better basis for understanding how and why cognitive problems onset with advanced age.

The project is timely for both societal and academic reasons. Adulthood is the period during which people make the greatest societal and economic contribution, making critical decisions about the health and economic future of themselves and others. We are currently in a period of significant demographic change, with growing numbers of older and elderly adults, many still in the workforce making important decisions. Academically, there is increasing recognition that reasoning and decision-making depends upon two distinct kinds of process, suited to faster "intuitive" and slower "reflective" decisions, and that our reasoning is more often "hot" than "cold", being strongly influenced by emotion and motivation. Understanding how these processes and factors influence cognition differently as we mature through adulthood is the central academic goal of the project. An additional very exciting aspect of our project is that we will combine our academic questions with a series of practical inquiries about how people make real decisions about their own health and lifestyle, allowing us to link theory and practice within the same project.

Our methods are innovative and novel in their application to these questions. Though grounded in well-established laboratory tasks from developmental, cognitive, and social psychology, our primary source of data will come from custom made software apps installed on mobile tablets. We can use these apps to 'crowdsource' the data we need (by getting a large number of people to contribute), thereby using modern technologies to power our research. This will allow us to access a far larger number of participants who are more representative of the general population than those tested in typical laboratory studies. We will recruit people to help us with the study at a number of important public events (e.g., science and arts festivals) where we will also communicate to the public about our work. Conducting the project with this unique combination of tasks and this novel approach to data collection will also lay the groundwork for a programme of follow-up research, and lead the way in establishing these methods in UK social science research.

Our work will be of interest to a wide range of academic experts. We will share findings with them at expert conferences, through a workshop that we will organise at the end of the project, and by writing articles for scientific journals. The project will also be of great interest to those involved in popular brain and social science, as well as to people involved in policy and practice in relation to our shifting demography. To communicate with these stakeholders, we will hold periodic public engagement events throughout the project. These will simultaneously stimulate involvement in the project and help people become more aware of how adults make decisions and how thinking matures and changes during middle adulthood.

A key aim of the project is to radically change thinking about cognitive development during the middle adult years. Therefore, the main impact of the project will be felt by the academics that generate research and innovate practice in this field. Raising awareness of the complex nature of cognition during this period of life will inspire further research that will have implications for both theory and practice. The research will shed new light on developmental changes in cognitive processes and this new information will inform approaches to developing and testing interventions aimed at improving decision making in middle adulthood. Understanding the trajectories of cognition in adulthood also provides a critical context for research on cognitive decline and development of dementia in later age. Academic researchers working in different sub-disciplines of psychology, health and economic research will benefit from a new approach that links higher cognitive functions to everyday decision making. Researchers interested in health will be able to explore novel mechanisms that underpin choices about eating, drinking and exercise. Researchers working on cognition will have their work extended by introducing new motivational variables, helping to develop a broader research perspective. Developmental researchers will be inspired to study a period of life that has traditionally been neglected. Notably, the testing platform to be developed by the project will provide a practical and innovative method for studying the processes underlying decision making in middle adulthood. The project will provide a large data set that will be available for further analysis. Hence, the work will have impact by introducing a new approach to the field, which will enable traditionally different research topics to be integrated.

In addition to academic experts, the results of this project will benefit policy makers and public bodies responsible for the health and wellbeing of society by providing insight into how to communicate important social, financial, and health related information to this age group. Commercial organisations committed to providing healthy options in food products and fitness promotion services will also benefit in this way. Similarly financial, energy, and communication service providers will gain understanding that will help them frame consumer options more appropriately. Better understanding of decision-making processes in middle adulthood will also help to better target and design health interventions, and so the results will benefit health professionals. The public will benefit from the translation of research outputs into interventions designed to help them lead healthier lives and make sensible consumer choices.

The public organisations/venues in which we will hold public engagement events (local science, art, and history museums, public libraries and the University) will benefit by exhibitions to draw in the public and provide information about thinking and decision-making abilities across the lifespan.

The project researcher will benefit from training on multidisciplinary research, using mobile apps. This will also enhance UK capacity in cutting edge approaches to social science research that seeks to sample from nationally representative populations.