[ARC5] [Milsurplus] I Must Have Lost My Mind

[Brian Clarke]

Hello Mike,

 

I wouldn’t read anything of value into this study. It was of 2450 residents of the USA. Say we take the population of the USA as 245 million, then the sample size is 0.1%. If we accept the population of the world is about 7.7 billion, this sample falls to 0.00003%. Further, the researchers have chosen equal size samples for each age cohort, except two – 80 to 84-year olds and 85 to 89-year olds. But any smart person knows that the age-specific distribution of population is not as per this sampling, nor was there any comment on age-specific population distribution. Further, there was no check on the a priori language skills of, or relevance of the cognitive tasks posed to the participants in the various age cohorts, or in samples A, B and C. Luckily, the study reported is only nosological and does not posit any causal variables. Though the graphs are presented in the classical independent variable along the horizontal axis and dependent variable along the vertical axis style, no scientist would consider age alone to be a causal variable.

 

I clicked on the apparent link to find out about the authors – Nada!

 

My conclusion is that the paper was part of the ‘publish-or-perish’ economic mantra dogging American universities, and is not even worth using for hypothesis generation.

 

Further, you have made the classic error so frequently found in 1st and 2nd-year psychology students of thinking that the results reported in the paper actually apply to you. Like you, I am also 78 years of age, and I’m quite certain this paper is not worth using in the smallest room in the house.

 

In case you’re wondering about the source of my criticisms, I used to teach this kind of stuff at university, but at the same time I filled the students up with research methodology criteria so they could evaluative such stuff for themselves.

 

My suggestion? Have another beer and ignore the paper.

 

73 de Brian, VK2GCE

 

On Tuesday, 13 August 2019 10:37 PM, you said:

 

<snip> 

I have to admit that I am not as careful as I once was.  I chalk it up to this curve I saw in an article by the National Institutes of Health, indirectly measuring memory and concentration throughout a person's lifetime, by means of mass vocabulary testing over decades.  I note that with this past birthday I have reached the nadir of the curve at age 78.  The good news is that it appears to rise again through the mid-80s.

<graph edited to save bandwidth>


Unfortunately, this curve is simply raw data - no analysis is offered other than providing data for further development.  For those interested in details, the article (entitled When does cognitive functioning peak? The asynchronous rise and fall of different cognitive abilities across the lifespan), is at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4441622/

- Mike  KC4TOS

 

 

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