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Enjoy Your Ageless Mental Agility • 209
100
Percentage Maintaining Over Seven years
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Verbal Spatial Inductive Number Word
Meaning Orientation Reasoning Fluency
to age 60 to age 67
to age 74 to age 81
Table 7-1 Proportion of Individuals Who Maintain Stable
Levels of Performance Over Seven Years on Primary Abilities,
Schaie, 1996.
abilities well into old age. As late as their sixties, most peo-
ple do not show significant changes in mental abilities from
the last testing. By their eighties, most people have experi-
enced some decline in at least one area. Moreover, between
the ages of 74 and 81, less than half showed mental declines
on all of the mental activities tested. The other half showed
declines in some but not all abilities, particularly those re-
quiring psychomotor speed.
Other studies, such as the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of
Aging (BLSA), confirm these results. The BLSA has followed