Your article makes many important points regarding mixing cohort effects with developmental patterns. But I worry that it oversimplifies the discussion around cognitive performance and aging.
Specifically, there's a serious concern that longitudinal studies are distorted by practice effects in the cognitive assessment tasks. When you account for that, the results of cross sectional findings hold much better. See for example https://psycnet.apa.org/manuscript/2018-45562-001.pdf
Thank you, I appreciate that context and you flagging this, which I look forward to reading! I was triggered by this article to make the more general point, but I agree that the degree of potential “bias” between cross-sectional and longitudinal age effects is probably very domain specific. Thanks again-
Please make this clear: people of different ages at a specific year are not just different people, they are people *born in different years*. That is the cohort effect. People born in different years can be different because they are were born in different years. The article implies that only indirectly.
Phenomenal article.
Thank you for another fascinating piece. As a 66 year old I am quite relieved by Professor Kucharski’s observations.
Great article!
Hi Jenn,
Your article makes many important points regarding mixing cohort effects with developmental patterns. But I worry that it oversimplifies the discussion around cognitive performance and aging.
Specifically, there's a serious concern that longitudinal studies are distorted by practice effects in the cognitive assessment tasks. When you account for that, the results of cross sectional findings hold much better. See for example https://psycnet.apa.org/manuscript/2018-45562-001.pdf
Thank you, I appreciate that context and you flagging this, which I look forward to reading! I was triggered by this article to make the more general point, but I agree that the degree of potential “bias” between cross-sectional and longitudinal age effects is probably very domain specific. Thanks again-
Please make this clear: people of different ages at a specific year are not just different people, they are people *born in different years*. That is the cohort effect. People born in different years can be different because they are were born in different years. The article implies that only indirectly.