Understanding Cognition in Middle Adulthood

你的感觉和你20岁时的感觉一样吗？你的思维是不是也一样敏捷？你的直觉是更好还是更差？几年(或几十年)的经历如何影响了你做出是否锻炼或健康饮食或为退休存多少钱的决定？虽然几乎没有人会怀疑他们在成年后发生了变化，但《心理学》中一个令人惊讶的工作假设是，我们的思维和决策能力在青春期的动荡之后会达到一个平台期，并保持在大约相同的水平，直到我们在退休后经历一个相对较快的下降。我们的项目将通过测试关于哪种能力在50年的成年生活中应该提高或下降的预测，来探索思维能力的这一假想的“平台期”。这一项目可能会改变目前人们对终身发展的理解，并有助于为理解认知问题是如何以及为什么随着年龄增长而出现的奠定更好的基础。无论是出于社会还是学术原因，该项目都是及时的。成年期是人们对社会和经济做出最大贡献的时期，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，越来越多的老年人和老年人，其中许多人仍在劳动力大军中做出重要决定。在学术上，越来越多的人认识到，推理和决策取决于两种截然不同的过程，适合较快的“直觉”决定和较慢的“反思”决定，而且我们的推理往往是“热的”而不是“冷的”，受到情绪和动机的强烈影响。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，是该项目的中心学术目标。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相结合，使我们能够在同一项目中将理论和实践联系起来。我们的方法在这些问题上的应用是创新的和新颖的。尽管我们基于发展心理学、认知心理学和社会心理学的成熟实验室任务，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‘众包’我们需要的数据(通过让大量人贡献)，从而利用现代技术为我们的研究提供动力。这将使我们能够接触到比在典型实验室研究中测试的参与者更能代表一般人群的更多的参与者。我们将在一些重要的公共活动(如科学和艺术节)上招募人员来帮助我们进行研究，我们还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率先建立这些方法。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，以及通过为科学期刊撰写文章。该项目还将引起那些参与大众脑科学和社会科学的人，以及参与与我们人口结构变化相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。这将同时刺激人们对该项目的参与，并帮助人们更多地意识到成年人是如何做出决定的，以及思维是如何在中年时期成熟和变化的。

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.