ABSTRACT
A distinction between two types of cognition has been recognized since at least the 1920s. For example, Foster and Taylor (1920) found that young adults were superior in the construction of sentences containing three specific words and in memory for drawings, whereas older adults had a relative advantage in comprehension of questions, detection of absurdities, and definitions of abstract words. The authors interpreted this pattern in terms of young adults being more adaptable, whereas older adults were postulated to have an advantage when they could benefit from accumulated experience. A comparable classification was made several years later by Jones and Conrad (1933). These researchers found the largest age-related declines on tests that they claimed assessed “native capacity” or “sheer modifiability,” and the least age-related declines on tests that they felt were influenced by the “accumulative effects of experience.”
