Assessing the Degree to Which Domain Specific Experience Can Offset Age -Related Decline on Basic Cognitive Abilities and Complex Task Performance
Past research has found impaired performance on a range of cognitive abilities as a function of increasing age. However, it has been suggested and demonstrated in limited instances that domain-specific experience can help mitigate decline of specific abilities that underlie complex task performance. The present study sought to investigate whether or not experience could help buffer against age effects in the air traffic control domain. Professional air traffic controllers and non-controllers of varying ages performed a series of cognitive and air traffic control tasks. Our results indicate that whereas high levels of experience can reduce the magnitude of age-related decline on the component processes that underlie complex-task performance, this sparing is highly limited in scope. More importantly however, we observe that experience based sparing was more evident on complex tasks. These results suggest that retirement policies in the workplace that are based solely on chronological factors be reviewed, give the benefits of domain specific experience.
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign