A cursory reading lead me to believe that while the range for "peak" cognition between 35-45 seems comforting (because of my own age), it also has some implications for the any sort of "lifehacks" when it comes to cognitive performance.

It seems that the range can only be generalized to a society/population level, since chess was used as a proxy and there's a lot of things that can shift the "peak" at an individual level. It can also vary based on how solved the game is, for example go vs chess vs tic-tac-toe.

It is interesting to see it was a bigger range at a point later in life. But I can easily think of things like formula 1 where the age of the peak performer has slowly shifted towards younger drivers simply because the drivers get into go kart racing and work their way up to formula 1 faster.

Regardless, it seems like a promising study to demonstrate that it's never "too late" to improve yourself, which is a problem people start feeling in places like the tech bubble where age is intentionally or unintentionally used as a signal for findind a good candidate. And the "too late" sentiment also comes up when people decide to get into things like chess later in life.

The the flattness of the curve seems like a double edged sword, it means time to reach peak has no special technique to accelerate when you reach a peak or how long you stay there, but it also means as long as you started with a proper foundation, your performance will decline is a lot less than the lay person would imagine.

Is chess really a good proxy for measuring age effects?

Chess, after all, is a classic domain where expert performance is the result of intensive practice plus quality feedback (informally, the "10,000 hour" rule).

Computer chess plus the internet has made training better, cheaper, more accessible and more intense.

So nowadays anyone with any talent at the game should be able to progress faster than in the past.

Your last point is true but they weren't measuring learning rate, they were measuring cognitive performance.

I don't think chess was chosen because it's the best proxy, I think chess was chosen because of the sample size and data available about players and games and an almost quantitative model of performance during each game (optimal moves). Poker would also be valid or sudoku or many others but there's usually a certain amount of chance involved in most other games and the impact of that chance is hard to estimate.

I appreciated them focusing on chess exactly because of the third point you mentioned. It's a fairly even playing field in terms of learning opportunities.

F1 is particularly a bad example for the type of Cognitive performance the article speaks of. F1 needs réaction time, adrenalin control and extreme physicality

I mentioned F1 focusing more on the strategy of when and how early to shift, how to enter and leave corners, when to push the tires harder, what lap to switch from hard to soft tires, remembering the layout of the track, understanding spatially how close racers can get without crashing, when to activate DRS and overtake, and most importantly the constant calculation needed to find optimal lines while driving. Not to mention how drivers need to adapt based on weather conditions.

I'm not sure why you think it's a bad example of cognitive performance. Reaction time is a type of cognitive performance. I am not sure how time taken to move was incorporated as a signal used in the methods in this paper but how quickly a person is able to play an optimal move is just as much of an indicator of cognitive performance as finding the right move is. Adrenalin control is also about being able to focus and getting in "the zone" and that is very much a proxy to cognitive performance. And to a certain degree, it's very much not controllable at all on a conscious level, but you get the same "rush" in chess when you worry whether an opponent is going to see whatever tactic or strategy you're pursuing in a game. And I'm not sure what you mean by extreme physicality, do you mean having to keep (arguable unhealthy) weight standards or do you mean the G-forces the driver undergoes?

In my opinion the cognitive load of racing at those high speeds is just as taxing as chess, maybe different learned skills are empathized. Other than extreme physicality, Bullet and Blitz chess require reaction time and adrenalin control too.

As an old person (56), it seems to me the error limits are fairly symmetric, and my brain isn't really going to just quit any time soon, which I find quite reassuring.

Now if we could just get doctors to stop assuming that the declines I've already experienced are "normal", the rest of you might have a nicer ride up to my age, and beyond.

What I found most interesting was that older players are a bit past their prime, but on par with folks in their 20s.

If you're young, your best years are ahead of you, middle aged you're in them, and beyond you're just 20 again but presumably sleeping more and much wealthier.

Offtopic: is it just me that can't comprehend this title?

I'm not a native english speaker, but this has happened all too often to me in the recent past and I'm thinking if I should be worried.

Native English speaker: I’d only be worried if the titles of scientific papers in particular used to be clear to you, as scientific papers are often hard enough even for me, and I’m a listed author on one[0].

In this case:

> Life cycle patterns of cognitive performance over the long run

I’m not sure why it needs any words after “performance”.

[0] technically, and ages ago: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250219248_Bottom-up...

Not just you, even as a native speaker this is very hard to parse. The title is ambiguous on its own (are "life cycle" and "long run" referring to the same thing?) and the abstract is very unclear.

This is a really interesting article; the cohort effect for increasing capability at younger ages for people with later birth years, in particular.

I wonder if this cohort effect is exacerbating inequality. Presumably whatever it is that is causing young people to reach peak performance sooner - better education, digital resources, as the article posits - is not evenly distributed.

You see this in tons of domains, not just chess. My personal hypothesis is that it has become so much easier to study and improve yourself based on the past insights of others, and this network creates ever accelerating standards.

For example, I recently (as a middle aged adult) took up ice skating. It probably won't be too long before I'll be at "early 1900s Olympic champion" level. Reason being that those early Olympic champions basically had to figure out how to do everything by trial and error. These days I can watch countless videos on YouTube explaining exactly how to practice certain elements.

So yes, the inequality factor is certainly there, but with even homeless people getting access to a base level smartphone these days I don't necessarily think it's insurmountable.

> I wonder if this cohort effect is exacerbating inequality.

It seems to me that increased capability would be more strongly correlated with productivity than with inequality. Certainly there's some correlation between productivity and inequality, but I think it's more complicated than a simple relationship. For example, the richest people are all past what would be considered their peak capability.

Tl;dr:

Chess players peak around age 35.

People are getting better at chess from generation to generation.

The generational gap is much larger than the young vs old gap.

EDIT: The method in the article measures performance based on deviation from best chess move as calculated by a computer.

it is just because knowledge is available and young ones have more time to learn from the past.