Mental speed hardly changes over a lifespan: Study shows that the speed of cognitive information processing remains largely stable over decades

Mental speed, the speed at which we can deal with issues requiring rapid decision-making, does not change much over decades. The psychologists at the university have come to a conclusion. They evaluated the data from a large-scale online experiment with over a million participants under the leadership of Dr Mischa von Krause. The findings of the new study show that the speed of cognitive information processing is stable between the ages of 20 and 60. The assumption that mental speed starts to decline in early adulthood has been called into question by the researchers.

The assumption is that the older we get, the slower we respond to external stimuli. The researcher in the Quantitative Research Methods department says that if that were the case, mental speed would be fastest at the age of twenty and then decline with increasing age. The data from the American study was reexamined in order to verify the theory. In the online experiment with over a million participants, subjects had to press a button to sort pictures of people into different categories. The researchers used a large amount of data to measure the duration of cognitive decisions.

When evaluating the data, Dr von Krause and his colleagues noted that the response times of the test subjects increased with age. With the help of a mathematical model, they were able to show that the phenomenon was not due to changes in mental speed. Motor execution speed slows down during adult life as older participants in the experiment need longer to press the appropriate key after they have found the right answer.

The study found that the average information processing speed declined with participants over the age of 60. The average trend is what our results relate to.

The German Research Foundation funded the research work in the context of the research training group for PhD students. The results were published in a journal.

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The materials were provided by the university. Content can be edited for style and length.

Journal reference

1. Mischa von Krause, Stefan T. Radev, Andreas Voss. Mental speed is high until age 60 as revealed by analysis of over a million participants. Nature Human Behaviour, 2022; DOI: 10.1038/s41562-021-01282-7