This chapter is intended to serve as a tutorial on expertise. As a result, it represents a very selective review of studies in order to sketch what I believe to be the main trends in the study of expertise as they may apply to research on aging. For a fine general overview of this topic, see Hoyer (1985). To start with, it is useful to recall a point raised by George Talland about 20 years ago. Talland noted a feature of aging that many investigators have since commented on, namely, that there are many older people in our society who function well, and some who function in expert fashion. He put it this way:

I shall try to respond to Talland's challenge by assessing what we have learned in recent years about expertise and how the joint study of age and expertise can shed new light on issues important to both fields.

Nonexperimental methods have a well-accepted place among the research strategies employed by psychologists. Such methods have long been part of the standard content of textbooks dealing with research methodology (Elmes, Kantowitz, & Roediger, 1985; Festinger & Katz, 1953). In certain areas of the field (e.g., the psychology of personality or abnormal psychology), naturalistic investigations predominate. In other areas (e.g., perception, learning, and memory), the laboratory approach has been preeminent.

Historical perspective

Experimental methods were introduced into psychology during the 19th century, when it was first demonstrated that some psychological questions would yield to a laboratory attack. The success of these first efforts promoted the acceptance of psychology as a science and gave rise to the term “experimental psychology.” Although the meaning of that term has changed somewhat during the last 100 years (Danziger, 1985), the emphasis on the laboratory as a place for empirical explorations has remained and has promoted the scientific status of psychology. Exclusive organizations and journals (e.g., the Society of Experimental Psychologists and the Journal of Experimental Psychology) helped to establish traditions and define a separate, elitist image for laboratory research and for psychologists who used experimental methods. Memory research has been dominated by these traditions for most of the past century. However, demands for ecological validity have challenged these traditions from time to time, and the challenges have been particularly effective during the last decade.

The term “cognitive training ” conjures up the image of young students in a classroom, receiving instruction from a teacher. There is the implicit assumption that the young students did not possess cognitive abilities prior to cognitive training, so that the focus of training is on de novo learning. The critical question is whether or not, as a result of cognitive training, there is acquisition of specific knowledge and skills. However, cognitive training is being increasingly employed as a research paradigm across the life span. Questions regarding the purpose and effectiveness of cognitive training at later life stages often are quite different from those relating to the young students. Cognitive training in old age has recently been of particular interest, given the normative pattern of intellectual decline in this developmental period.

This chapter provides a selective review of recent research on cognitive training in later adulthood. The research literature will be reviewed with regard to five major questions: What cognitive abilities have been the targets of cognitivetraining research? What is modified as a function of training? How large is the magnitude of the training effect? Who benefits from cognitive training? Are training effects maintained over time? The literature review will focus on the psychometric mental abilities and the cognitive problem-solving skills that have been studied via a training paradigm. The chapters in this volume by Bäckman (Chapter 28), West (Chapter 30), and Yesavage, Lapp, and Sheikh (Chapter 31) review the memory-training literature.

My comments focus on three broad issues that enter prominently into much of the content of the chapters in this section: the conceptualization of aging's effects on memory proficiency, the generalizability of laboratory memory performances to everyday memory performances, and the concept of expertise and its implications for aging's effects on everyday memory performances.

Aging's effects on memory proficiency

General-decrement principle

The nature of research on adult age differences in everyday memory performances is likely to be influenced greatly by one's conceptualization of aging's effects on memory proficiency. The conceptualization that has dominated laboratory research on adult age differences in memory proficiency may best be described in terms of a general-decrement principle. The carryover of this principle to research on everyday memory performances has obvious important implications. It surely will preclude attempts by investigators to discover components of everyday memory that are immune to age-related decrements in proficiency or to explore means of alleviating or reducing age-related decrements for those components that are age-sensitive.

According to this principle, irreversible decrements in memory proficiency are inevitable consequences of the organism's biological degeneration from early to late adulthood, resulting either in a decrease in cognitive resources (Hasher & Zacks, 1979) or in a “slowing down” of cognitive processes (Salthouse, 1980) during old age. Much of the emphasis in contemporary aging-memory research is on testing the validities of these theoretical accounts of why memory proficiency declines with aging.

A common complaint among older people is their increasing difficulty in finding common words and proper names with which they are familiar in everyday speaking and writing (e.g., Zelinski, cited in Burke & Light, 1981). At the same time, vocabulary scores indicate that knowledge of word meanings is well maintained with increasing age (Botwinick, 1977; Kramer & Jarvik, 1979). Tulving and Thomson (1973) distinguished between semantic memory (i.e., the store of knowledge about words and concepts, their properties and interrelations) and episodic memory (i.e., the store of knowledge about personally experienced events). Standard laboratory tests have suggested that semantic memory is retained well into old age (Eysenck, 1975; Smith & Fullerton, 1981), in contrast to episodic memory, which shows impairment with age (Craik & Simon, 1980; Perlmutter, 1979). Bowles and Poon (1985a) suggested that the laboratory tasks that have been used to measure semantic-memory functioning are not sensitive to the deficits of which older people complain.

Word retrieval is of special interest in this context because it has been studied in the naturalistic setting (Cohen & Faulkner, 1986; Reason & Lucas, 1983), in the clinical setting (Goodglass, 1980; Nicholas, Obler, Albert, & Goodglass, 1985), and in the laboratory setting (Bowles & Poon, 1985a, 1985b; Brown, 1979). In this chapter it is argued that the research goals differ in these settings, and each makes its own contribution to our understanding of behavior.

The quotation comes from the South African poet Roy Campbell and refers to the work of South African novelists of the earlier years of this century. The sentiment is, however, much more widely applicable, and it could, without too much distortion, be applied to the work over the last 50 years of students of memory such as myself. Science needs controlled observation and hence is always open to the risk that excessive control, “the snaffle and the curb,” may stifle the phenomenon that is being observed, “the bloody horse.” Such a criticism is not, of course, novel: “If X is an interesting or socially significant aspect of memory, then psychologists have hardly ever studied X” (Neisser, 1978, p. 4).

The tension between the need for control and the need to preserve the essence of the phenomenon under investigation has been present since the scientific study of memory began 100 years ago, with two investigators both beginning to tackle the question of how human memory could best be studied. In Germany, Ebbinghaus opted for a highly constrained experimental approach in which the phenomena of memory were stripped down to the minimum, with everything rigidly controlled. If it proved difficult to hold something constant, as was the case with meaning, then every effort was made to exclude it from the study.

The laboratory offers a high degree of experimental control. That is why laboratories were devised in the first place, and that is why scientists often forsake real-world problems to enter them. This chapter is an argument that, given our present state of knowledge, control is more often a vice than a virtue. It is not experimental control that is now desirable, but rather regularity of results. The time for control will come, but psychology entered the laboratory too quickly. Psychology must first spend time observing and quantifying behavior in its fuller state of complexity. This chapter describes the rationale for this approach, followed by examples of research that has applied it to the topic of human memory.

The best way to start arguing for a flight from the laboratory in the area of memory research is to examine how we entered the laboratory in the first place. Ebbinghaus (1885/1964), in arguing that human memory could be studied in a scientific fashion, provided as clear a definition of the experimental method as exists in the psychological literature. In a section titled “The Method of Natural Science,” he writes as follows:

Memory serves many functions in the everyday transactions between the individual and the world. For example, we remember to stop at the grocery store, we remember where the grocery store is located, we remember how to drive an automobile in order to get to the grocery store, and, once there, we remember that we need to acquire the makings of a company meal scheduled for 2 days hence. These pieces of remembered information could be acquired in a number of ways, but in many everyday examples the remembered information is acquired through the processing of spoken or written language. We might, for example, hear or read instructions on how to drive a stick-shift automobile. The sequence of operations described in the verbal instructions would be stored and translated into a sequence of motor actions. Of course, the activity would not progress smoothly until such time as the motor actions became relatively automatic, but the initial representation of the activity could be acquired through spoken or written language. This chapter is concerned with the acquisition of information from written language (referred to as “prose” or “discourse”). The acquisition of information from spoken language is taken up in Chapter 13 by Stine, Wingfield, and Poon.

This chapter begins with a brief natural history of research in the area in which various kinds of studies intersect: discourse-processing, memory, and aging studies. Next, the current status in this research area is described, and the interpretation of current findings within existing models is outlined.

Strain on those caring for the elderly

Although there has been an emphasis on the development of day-hospital and community provisions, there is little evidence that such facilities provide an alternative to hospital care or relieve the strain on the carers, which is the main reason for referral (Greene & Timbury, 1979). It is well recognized that there is severe strain on carers, and there are deleterious effects on their health. Gilleard (1984) reported that on the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) (Goldberg, 1978), 73% of persons caring for patients attending a geriatric or psychogeriatric day hospital probably were suffering from some degree of psychiatric disturbance. The reported level of distress among those caring for psychogeriatric patients was only just higher than the level for those caring for geriatric patients (Table 34.1).

Gilleard also noted that there was no significant difference between the two groups of carers in regard to the numbers of problems reported. However, the nature of the problems did distinguish between the two groups. In general, the geriatric patients experienced greater impairments of mobility, which have been shown to be reasonably well tolerated by carers (Isaacs, 1971). This group of carers also described significant levels of behavioral disturbance and/or communications problems, although these were less frequent than those reported by people caring for psychogeriatric patients. These behavioral and communications problems are particular sources of strain for carers.

As a scientific enterprise, the study of memory is relatively new and fairly successful. The methods set out by Ebbinghaus only a century ago are adequate to demonstrate that the psychological study of memory can be scientific. As we progress and try to demonstrate that psychology can also increase our practical and theoretical understandings, Ebbinghaus's laboratory methods often seem insufficient. Our own progress and confidence have led us to broaden the research we do.

One aspect of this progress has been the call for cognitive and experimental psychologists to move out of the laboratory. Recent examples include this book, Neisser's attacks on the kind of laboratory studies he carried out in 1967, numerous American Psychologist articles on basic methodological issues, and even the “Call for Papers” of the Psychonomic Society. Possibly independent of all of this, academic and research psychologists are spending a greater proportion of their time studying practical, complex, real-world problems in the name of science. Is this really a good idea, or just the latest fad? Psychology is fond of the theory of pendulum swings. Can a little forethought dampen the pendulum?

Part I of this book provides a rationale, or, more accurately, a set of rationales, for studying cognition in the “real world” rather than in the laboratory. Unlike Parts II and III, Part I does not provide reviews of the literature, but rather provides arguments for pursuing science in various ways.

Definition of world knowledge

I distinctly remember an event that took place when I was a graduate student. I was giving an older gentleman in a retirement home the Information subtest of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (Wechsler, 1955) and asked the question, “How far is it from Paris to New York? ” My respondent waited a moment and then said in a steady and deliberate voice, “Well, Lindbergh flew there in about 36 hours, with an average air speed of about 100 m.p.h., so I'll say that it's about 3600 miles. ” His response surprised me, for I had asked many younger adults this question, but had never encountered either this level of accuracy or this particular approach to deriving the answer. This older gentleman had retrieved facts from what appeared to be an impressive base of knowledge about his life and world (i.e., “world knowledge ”) and additionally had created a new piece of information to be retained for future use. Three interrelated questions immediately came to mind: (1) How is this knowledge base created? (2) What processes influence the utilization of this knowledge base? (3) How does human aging influence these mental structures and processes? The search for answers to these questions has led to a series of studies in a relatively new but rapidly growing area of research.

In a recent paper (Bäckman, 1985a), I introduced a conceptual frame of reference for research on adult aging and episodic remembering based on the superordinate concepts of compensation and recoding. This chapter constitutes an extension and elaboration of the framework proposed there. One basic point of departure for the discussion here concerns the fact that older adults possess the ability to compensate for various deficits in episodic remembering through different types of contextual and cognitive support. A classification scheme comprising three basic categories of memory compensation in later adulthood is presented: compensation via experimenter-provided support, compensation via inherent task properties, and compensation via cognitive-support systems. These categories deal with proximal interactions between the capabilities of the learner and the actual task demands. It is also suggested that younger adults, because of superior ability in various recoding operations, are less dependent on contextual and cognitive support in order to remember successfully. “Recoding ” is here defined as “all the processes and operations an individual possesses that, when applied, bring about a richer and more elaborate representation of the initially registered information to be remembered ” (Tulving, 1983).

It is argued that a multifactorial approach is a necessary prerequisite for gaining the best understanding of what happens with memory as one gets older. Accordingly, some aspects of memory compensation in later adulthood other than those falling under the aforementioned categories are described.