der adults. Caplan and Greene (1999) looked at message-production skill acquisition in younger and older adults in learning a sequence for describing geometric arrays. They found that older adults= learning curves, regardless of task complexity, were characterized by greater
variability in performance quality between trials than those of younger students. They add that these results are consistent with changes in processing speed and working memory capacity that are believed to occur with advancing age.
However, even though changes in intellectual performance do occur with age, these changes occur in what is known as Afluid intelligence@ or, in psychological terms, the available central capacity for information processing. There seems to be little or no decline with age, and possibly even a growth, in Acrystallized intelligence,@ and especially in tasks that have to do with expertise and the development of systems of knowledge - what we commonly call wisdom (Baltes, Dittman-Kohli and Dixon, 1984). Dittman-Kohli and Baltes (1990) believe that older people would be more capable of exhibiting the interpretative, contextualized, and relativistic conceptions of learning that others have claimed constitute genuine intellectual development among university students. Baltes, Dittman-Kohli and Dixon (1990) suggest that adults tend to optimize their adaptation to the demands of everyday life, even with reduced central capacity, by de-emphasizing irrelevant skills. They also point out that most of the tests used to measure changes in intellectual capacity were originally designed to be used with children and young adults, and may be inappropriate for use with older adults. Another point is that most older students in higher education are between the ages of 25 and 34, and so their cognitive abilities should be similar to those of traditional students as they have not yet reached the age where these abilities begin to decline.
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