Cognitively elite, cognitively normal, and cognitively impaired aging: Neurocognitive status and stability moderate memory performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Although recent theories of brain and cognitive aging distinguish between normal, exceptional, and impaired groups, further empirical evidence is required. We adapted and applied standard procedures for classifying groups of cognitively impaired (CI) and cognitively normal (CN) older adults to a third classification: cognitively healthy, exceptional, or elite (CE) aging. We then examined concurrent and two-wave longitudinal performance on composite variables of episodic, semantic, and working memory. METHOD: We began with a two-wave source sample from the Victoria Longitudinal Study (VLS; source n = 570; baseline age = 53-90 years). The goals were to: (a) apply standard and objective classification procedures to discriminate three cognitive status groups, (b) conduct baseline comparisons of memory performance, (c) develop two-wave status stability and change subgroups, and (d) compare of stability subgroup differences in memory performance and change. RESULTS: As expected, the CE group performed best on all three memory composites. Similarly, expected status stability effects were observed: (a) stable CE and CN groups performed memory tasks better than their unstable counterparts, and (b) the stable (and chronic) CI group performed worse than its unstable (variable) counterpart. These stability group differences were maintained over two waves. CONCLUSION: New data validate the expectations that (a) objective clinical classification procedures for cognitive impairment can be adapted for detecting cognitively advantaged older adults, and (b) performance in three memory systems is predictably related to the tripartite classification.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".