Understanding Cognition in Middle Adulthood

你觉得自己还像20岁时那样吗？你的思维敏捷吗？你的直觉是更好还是更差？几年（或者几十年）的经验如何影响你决定是否锻炼或健康饮食，或者为退休储蓄多少钱？虽然很少有人会怀疑他们在成年后的生活中发生了变化，但心理学中一个令人惊讶的假设是，我们的思考和决策能力在青春期的动荡之后会达到一个平台期，并保持在同一水平，直到我们在退休后经历一个相对快速的下降。我们的项目将通过测试预测哪种能力在50年的成年生活中会提高或下降，来探索这种所谓的思维能力“平台期”。这个项目可能会改变目前对整个生命周期发展的理解，并帮助建立一个更好的基础，来理解认知问题是如何以及为什么随着年龄的增长而出现的。从社会和学术的角度来看，这个项目是及时的。成年期是人们做出最大社会和经济贡献的时期，对自己和他人的健康和经济未来做出关键决定。我们目前正处于人口结构发生重大变化的时期，老年人和老年人的数量不断增加，其中许多人仍在工作中做出重要决定。在学术上，越来越多的人认识到，推理和决策取决于两种不同的过程，适用于更快的“直觉”和更慢的“反思”决策，我们的推理往往是“热的”而不是“冷的”，受到情感和动机的强烈影响。了解这些过程和因素如何在我们成年后对认知产生不同的影响是该项目的核心学术目标。我们项目的另一个非常令人兴奋的方面是，我们将把我们的学术问题与一系列关于人们如何对自己的健康和生活方式做出真正决定的实际调查结合起来，使我们能够在同一个项目中将理论和实践联系起来。我们的方法在这些问题的应用上是创新的和新颖的。虽然我们的研究是建立在发展心理学、认知心理学和社会心理学的实验基础上的，但我们的主要数据来源将来自安装在移动平板电脑上的定制软件应用程序。我们可以使用这些应用程序来“众包”我们需要的数据（通过让大量的人贡献），从而使用现代技术来推动我们的研究。这将使我们能够接触到更多的参与者，他们比那些在典型的实验室研究中测试的人更能代表一般人群。我们将在一些重要的公共活动（如科学和艺术节）中招募人员帮助我们进行研究，我们也将在这些活动中与公众交流我们的工作。以这种独特的任务组合和这种新颖的数据收集方法来开展该项目，也将为后续研究计划奠定基础，并在英国社会科学研究中建立这些方法。我们的工作将引起广泛的学术专家的兴趣。我们将在专家会议上与他们分享发现，通过我们将在项目结束时组织的研讨会，以及为科学期刊撰写文章。这个项目也会引起那些参与大众大脑和社会科学的人，以及那些参与与人口变化有关的政策和实践的人的极大兴趣。为了与这些利益相关者沟通，我们将在整个项目期间定期举行公众参与活动。这将同时激发人们对项目的参与，并帮助人们更加了解成年人是如何做决定的，以及在成年中期思维是如何成熟和变化的。

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.