ABSTRACT
It is a common fact of experience that people’s cognitive and memorial abilities do not remain perfectly constant throughout life. Although such characteristics do exhibit remarkable consistency from adolescence through middle age, there are substantial changes that occur in old age and in early childhood. The critical dates for these changes do exhibit a fair degree of consistency across individuals, suggesting that some basic developmental process or processes are involved concerning neural function. In childhood, there seems to be a critical difference in the information processing capacities between children below the age of 5 and those between 5 and 7 (cf. White, 1970). Perhaps it is no accident that the age of 5 or 6 is when serious schooling for the child commences in practically all countries. In old age, the demarcation line for information processing changes is not so sharply drawn; however, the ages between 65 and 70 seem to be a critical period here (cf. Schonfield & Stones, 1979). Again, it may be more than coincidence that retirement ages are set in this span. Nor can it be argued that purely physical or morphological reasons dictate such retirement since many of today’s jobs involve minimal physical exertion.
