Multiple Perspectives on the Development of Adult Intelligence

Abstract

This chapter explores the development of adult intelligence from four different perspectives: the psychometric, cognitive, neo-Piagetian, and contextual. These four perspectives were chosen to review the literature on adult intelligence because they offer a fairly diverse representation of guiding theories to adult intelligence that are dominant in the field at the present time. Other perspectives on intelligence (e.g., comparative, biological, artificial intelligence) have not had the same presence in the field of adult intelligence as have these four perspectives. These four perspectives on adult intelligence offer different answers to two questions that have guided the field of adult intelligence: (1) What is intelligence throughout adult development? and (2) How does intelligence develop across the adult lifespan? The psychometric and cognitive perspectives define intelligence to be largely the same throughout the lifespan, comprising broad mental abilities that are believed to characterize intelligence during childhood and adolescence. The neo-Piagetian and contextual perspectives hold that intelligence may change in its composition across the adult lifespan as individuals integrate the emotional and nonrational into thinking systems and traverse different contexts in middle and late life that afford different opportunities and constraints. In part because of these different starting points for the definition of intelligence, these four different perspectives chart different developmental trajectories for adult intelligence (i.e., decline, maintenance, and improvement). However, all struggle with the potential for both gains and losses at any point during adult development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)