Huh? Fluid-Crystallized Intelligence

As I scoured academe for stuff to blog about, I came across this study. Here's the abstract. Bold face emphases are mine.

Using the theory of fluid-crystallized intelligence, we argue that with growing age, political discussion becomes less important as a complement to news exposure in political knowledge building. We applied moderated mediation analyses to the survey data of N = 69,125 German respondents. The data supported the hypothesis that news exposure influences political discussion, which in turn leverages political knowledge. As expected, we showed that news exposure is more strongly associated with political discussion for younger age groups. The results are discussed with regard to how to integrate a psychological lifespan perspective into further research on knowledge acquisition.

Theory of fluid-crystallized intelligence? Wow. I used to think of myself as moderately well read in the political knowledge literature, but this one kinda frightens me. Sadly, I don't have access to the full manuscript, just the abstract, even with my office computer and IP#. Essentially this seems to be saying age matters. The older you get, the less important talking to people matters in political knowledge. It's based on a huge survey of 69,125 Germans. I wish I had access to the full study so I could peek at it further, but it may be some form of the Eurobarometer, but that seems less likely now that I think of it, as it's a survey of all of western Europe, not just Germany.

I did dig something up on this theory. Here's an older piece that says as you get older, you get less intelligent. Has to do with the plasticity of the brain, best I can tell.

Memory and Recognition

Dunno why, but I find this fascinating -- a study of how well people of different ages recognize faces from either contemporary or historical figures. Younger subjects did better recognizing contemporary famous people, older subjects did better with "dated" famous people. No real surprise. What I find fascinating is how young adults better recalled "young" versus "old" familiar faces, and younger adults performed better than older ones when it came to "young" unfamiliar faces.

What's it all mean? As we get older, prior knowledge becomes harder to access to help us make sense of what we see.

How does this fit what people know? Turn this into a question of political knowledge and recognition of political actors and you see how older citizens, who often do well on these tests and have superior prior knowledge (based in part on experience), will struggle to make sense of new information as they have a hard time making use of all that experience and prior knowledge. It's there, but they have a hard time finding the facts or names to fit a familiar face -- be it politician or someone else in the news. As the news audience ages, especially for broadcast TV news but also for newspapers, we need to rethink how we tell stories to help the aging audience with the realities of difficult-to-access prior knowledge. It's there, we just need to learn ways to help them trigger that knowledge so they can better make sense of the stories we're telling.