Acquiring and Maintaining Expertise in Aging Populations
This chapter reviews literature related to relationships between expertise and aging. It first considers how experts excel on domain-relevant tasks despite cognitive limitations and how these expertise-related advantages develop, which suggest ways in which adults can offset age-related cognitive constraints to maintain performance in later years. The chapter then reviews studies that examine two issues about how expertise influences performance as we age. First, to what extent high-level experts can retain superior levels of performance as they age, an issue often addressed in fairly narrow domains such as games, sports, and music. A second, broader issue concerns whether the benefits or costs associated with domain-general as well as domain-specific knowledge change with age. This second issue is central to lifespan theory: To what extent does knowledge and skill associated with experience offset age-related declines in abilities and function.