Synchrony Affects Performance for Older but not Younger Neutral-Type Adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Circadian rhythms influence performance on a broad range of cognitive tasks, including attention shifting, implicit learning, memory retrieval, suppression of distracting information, creativity, and problem solving. Much of the research on circadian arousal and cognition has examined the consequence of testing individuals at times that are synchronous or asynchronous with their personal circadian peaks. To date, the studies examining these synchrony effects in cognitive function have focused primarily on the performance of individuals who show strong morningness or strong eveningness tendencies; little is known about individuals with neutral chronotypes and whether their performance varies over the day. The lack of data on neutral types is a serious gap in our knowledge, as up to 60% of young adults and 25% of older adults do not show strong morning or evening preferences. The present study assessed the performance of neutral-type younger and older adults at three times of day (early morning, midday, and evening) on a battery of cognitive tasks, including inhibitory processing, executive function, memory, perceptual speed, and access to well-learned knowledge. Older neutral-types showed synchrony effects for inhibitory processing, executive function, long-term memory, and forgetting, and generally had best performance on these tasks at midday. Consistent with other findings, older neutral-types showed no synchrony effects for measures of general knowledge and perceptual speed. Younger neutral-types, by contrast, showed no effects of time of testing on performance over the day for any measure, suggesting greater cognitive flexibility over the day relative to younger evening-types, older morning-types, or older neutral-types.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.003 |
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".