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This chapter sketches a map of the ground to be covered in education for virtue, organized around a progression of three types of tasks of moral education. It is argued that society is pretty effective inelementarytasks of initiation into the use of ethical concepts andmodularor domain-specific tasks of teaching people how to cooperate in particular institutions and roles.Integrativetasks — more difficult but indispensable for the formation of a clearly good moral character — seem to demand more individual autonomy, and to lie less within the power of social groups. In opposition to some situationist arguments, the last section of the chapter defends the desirability of teaching virtue to the extent that it can be taught.

This chapter provides estimates for both younger and older adults for 15 elementary tasks/processes investigated in this chapter (fixation duration, flicker fusion threshold, gap detection threshold, tapping speed, movement time towards a target, memory scanning, subitizing, counting, mental rotation, feature visual search, conjunction visual search, simple reaction time, choice reaction time, P300, and lexical decision times), as well as the half-life of the iconic and short-term memory store, and the Hicks-Hyman Law. Brinley analyses for these data are available as well. Practice effects were investigated and these effects were found to be largely identical across age groups, regardless of the task.

Date from the previous chapter were fitted to different models of 1-15 dimensions; all model did reasonably well. A consensus model could be formulated as follows: (1). Spatial tasks yield larger age-related effects than linguistic tasks and, more generally, tasks involving manipulations of lexical items (such as memory search) as well. (2). Within spatial tasks, lower-level or ‘early’ tasks, likely involving occipital structures (such as flicker fusion threshold and feature visual search), generally yield smaller age-related effects than more integrative, ‘later’ spatial tasks, likely driven more by parietal structures (such as subitizing, conjunction visual search¹, and mental rotation). (3). When no decision component is involved, sensorimotor tasks yield small or no age-related effects; when a decision component is involved, a more moderate age-related slowing factor is observed (flicker fusion threshold and tapping rate vs. movement time, simple RT, and choice RT).