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The woman, 69 years old and still active as a professor at Harvard University, told a research team that she had begun to find it hard to recall the names of ever faculty members. Not long ago she had forgotten her classroom number when asking for a slide projector to be sent up. She had one anxious question for the research team, assembled to study the normal course of mental aging: “Am I losing my ability to remember, and perhaps even to think clearly?”

That question is the principal focus of a new wave of scientific inquiry on the decline in mental ability with age. The findings are challenging some basic assumptions, like the belief that such decline is a natural part of the aging process, irrespective of general health.

From 20 to 30 percent of people in their 80s who volunteer for cognitive testing perform as well as volunteers in their 30s and 40s, who are presumably in their mental prime. The intellectual and creative productivity in later life of certain artists and intellectuals may represent not so much an exception as an ideal, some experts now say.

Dr KW Schaie, a psychologist at Pennsylvania State University, is the director of a major study of normal mental decline in the elderly. For over 35 years, his study has been following more than 5000 men and women who have been tested regularly. Dr Schaie’s investigations seek to fill a gap in gerontological research, which, according to Dr Jack Rowe, president of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a leading expert in the field, has focused on disease and disability, and neglected the prospects of maintaining high functioning in old age. Dr Rowe heads a research network on successful aging sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation. In an interview he pointed out that gerontologists have focused on ‘"the 6 to 15 percent of the elderly who are frail and then lumped everyone else together as normal. But there is a huge variation from person to person among older people: the older a group gets, the less like each other people in it become.”

Dr Schaie’s most recent findings were reported this month in The American Psychologist. Although the study’s results show abilities begin to decline gradually in the middle to late 60s and accelerate in the late 70s. The rate of decline differs for various mental faculties and differs in men and women. The sharpest declines are seen in basic mathematics. By their late 80s, both men and women were only about half as adept in basic math as they had been in their 50s. For men, the least decline shown is in spatial orientation, for example, in reading a map correctly. By the late 80s, it had dropped by only about one-eighth on average.

For women, the most enduring mental skill is inductive reasoning, assessing the information in a timetable, for instance. As women reached their late 80s, it had dropped just over one-eighth from its height in middle age. One of the drastic declines for women proved to be in verbal comprehension, while that ability dropped relatively little into the 70s, it plummeted by about one-quarter during the 80s. For men, the decline was slight in those years.

Another study, this one by Dr Richard Mons, a psychologist at Mount Sinai Medical School who is the acting director of a research consortium on normal memory loss and aging sponsored by the Charles A. Dana Foundation, has found that different kinds of memory differ in their vulnerability to aging. “Crystallized” memory, ie, vocabulary or other knowledge accumulated over the years holds up very well into old age. “Fluid” memory, on the other hand, the ability to add new information to memory or to recall something that happened recently is more prone to decline, beginning in the 60s. He found little decline in very short-term memory, like remembering a telephone number just looked up.

A pair of Harvard psychologists, Douglas Powell and Kean Whitla, have designed a computerized test of mental skills like long-term and short-term memory, attention, reasoning and calculation; they reported the test in the February issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science. They are the researchers whom the 69-year-old professor spoke with. Their test compares a person’s score with norms for others of the same age, for people who are still in middle age and for others in their own professional group.

Dr Schaie’s study has found certain predictors for good mental function in old age. These include a high level of ability in reading comprehension and verbal fluency, a successful career or some other involvement through life and continuing keen mental interests after retirement. Having a flexible attitude in middle age was also a promising indicator. “There is less mental decline in people who adapt easily to change, who like learning new things and enjoy going to new places,” Dr Schaie observed. The study also found that simply living with someone with these characteristics is beneficial. “It helps to have a high-functioning spouse, since this is your major immediate social environment and support.” Dr Schaie stated.

1.The 69-year-old woman mentioned at the beginning of the passage is finding it increasingly( ) .

A、 difficult to remember who her colleagues are.

B、difficult to recall some of her colleagues’ faces

C、difficult to remember what some of her colleagues are called

D、easy to forget the name of her faculty

E、easy to forget what some of her younger colleagues do in the faculty

2.Some artists and intellectuals remain productive to the very end of long lives. The writer of the passage states that some experts .

A、believe that such examples are more common than gerontologists formerly supposed

B、are certain that such late productivity is impossible for ordinary people in other walks of life

C、are almost certain that in the future such late productivity will become quite ordinary

D、suspect that it is wrong to regard such late productivity as abnormal rather than simply uncommon

E、reject the idea that such people can be taken as models for normal human beings

3.Dr Schaie’s findings reveal that( ) .

A、the pattern of mental decline among men and women is virtually identical

B、loss of the ability to calculate is severe in women, but much less so in men

C、among older women, inductive reasoning is just as impaired by aging as is basic math

D、damage to inductive reasoning among the elderly is about equal for men and women

E、loss of the ability to calculate is severe in both men and women

4.Dr Schaie tells us that the average 85-year-old woman is likely to have lost a good deal of her ability to( ) .

A、use numbers and understand language

B、use numbers and read timetables

C、read timetables and use maps

D、understand language and read timetables

E、learn new facts and use numbers

5.Dr Jack Rowe, in addition to serving as director of a well-known medical school,

A、is the head of a foundation that gives money for research on the problems of the elderly

B、is one of America’s top gerontologists studying old people with abnormally severe memory loss

C、is the leader of a tightly coordinated research association studying how to remain healthy in old age

D、is responsible for deciding which experts on successful aging will get research grants from the MacArthur Foundation

E、is the leader of a loosely coordinated group of research teams studying how to remain healthy in old age

6.Dr Rowe says, there is a huge variation from person to person among older people: the older a group gets, the less like each other the people in it become.” This can best be paraphrased (re-stated) as .

A、The older the people in a group get, the more characteristics they share Differences between individuals in a group diminish as age increases

B、As people age, certain similarities increase, while others become less marked

C、Human individuals are very dissimilar at any age; this is no less true as people grow older

D、Overall resemblances between members of a human group decrease as the years go by

7.Which of these items would Dr Mohs not classify as part of your crystallized memory?

A、A headline in last week’s newspaper

B、The date of your eldest child’s birth

C、Your mother’s name

D、The meaning of the English word “geology”

E、The formula for finding the area of a triangle

8.What Powell and Whitla have created( ) .

A、constitutes a great advance in computer software

B、compares someone like the 69-year-old woman with other women and with other people of various ages, but not with other university instructors

C、will probably confirm many of Dr Schaie’s findings and invalidate those of Dr Mohs

D、should make it easier to determine the relative mental skills of large numbers of people

E、will be of little use to Dr Schaie but very valuable for Dr Mohs

9.If you were a young man thinking of getting married and you asked Dr Schaie for advice he would probably tell you to( ) .

A、marry someone quiet and dependable

B、seek unity and stability in your marriage

C、marry someone lively and curious

D、avoid women who are always trying to change their situations

E、choose someone who would rather read than travel

10.This article ( ).

A、is limited to a discussion of Dr Schaie’s recent research

B、surveys recent developments in the study of aging and the elderly

C、gives an overview of recent advances in the understanding of the relation between old age and mental activities

D、is primarily a criticism of the excessive concentration among earlier gerontologists on severe memory loss by the elderly

E、explains recent advances in scientific understanding of the physical mechanisms of mental decline among the aged

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