It's generally thought that with age comes wisdom — and recent research has found that we do seem to reach our mental peak later in life.
Researchers found that across a number of different measurements, our mental functioning peaks between the ages of 55 and 60, the later years of what we often consider as being "middle-aged."
The study first identified key psychological features associated with mental function. These included cognitive abilities like reasoning and memory, and personality traits such as openness and conscientiousness. The researchers also looked at emotional intelligence, moral reasoning and financial literacy.
Then the researchers looked at a wide range of already available data to track how these features tended to develop throughout a person's life. And they found that several traits actually reached their peak later in life.
Writing for The Conversation, Gilles Gignac from the University of Western Australia noted that conscientiousness, for example, peaked at around age 65.
The ability to resist cognitive biases — mental shortcuts that can cause us to make irrational or less accurate decisions — was even seen to be something that can improve into our 80s.
Other traits that improved later in life included vocabulary, emotional stability and financial literacy. And while some traits started to decline — including memory and some reasoning skills — the whole picture suggested an overall mental peak in late middle age, and a decline that only started from around age 65.
According to Gignac, the study findings could help explain why so many demanding leadership roles in business and politics tend to be held by people in their 50s and early 60s. He said the findings also make it harder to justify companies being less interested in hiring older workers.
Even if some abilities start to decline, the growth older people see in other important traits balances things out and helps them with judgment and decision-making.
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