Search Results

Self-control is defined in relation to current goals of an organism. Working memory capacity (WMC) is defined as a cognitive system for maintaining access to goal representations as needed. Self-control depends on cognitive control, which depends in large part on WMC. We discuss the proposal that WMC reflects the abilities to control attention and to control retrieval from long-term memory. From within this dual-component framework (Unsworth & Engle, 2007) we discuss research that has examined relations between WMC and some types of mental self-control failure like over-general autobiographical memories, intrusive thoughts, and mind-wandering. We also discuss research examining the relation between WMC and delay discounting, a popular experimental paradigm for assessing self-control (Rachlin, 2000). Evidence suggests that for some of these phenomena, WMC is a more primary factor than the associated clinical disorders. In other cases, WMC appears to be secondary to other factors such as intelligence. Across these mixed findings at least two generalities can be derived. The positive findings demonstrate that individual differences in WMC can be a confounding “third variable” for a proposed relation between, for example, depression and over-general autobiographical memories (Dalgleish et al., 2007). On the other hand, the negative findings illustrate that individual differences in WMC can obscure more primary influences in a situation like delay discounting (Shamosh et al., 2008). In either case it would be advisable for researchers to measure WMC as a participant factor, if only to control a major source of interindividual variability in their data. Overall, we hold to our position that WMC is critically important for maintaining good self-control in support of a wide variety of goals.

This chapter examines how the subjective assessment of work capacity is related to age using the Finnish Quality of Working Life Survey (QWLS) from the year 2003. The results provide clear evidence that employees' own assessment of their working capacity falls with age while there is no corresponding decline in wages by age. However, the fall in working capacity is not dramatic, as the majority of the older age groups still consider their working capacity to be relatively high in a scale from 0 to 10. Age affects working capacity, as least to the extent that the employees themselves think so.

This chapter examines the evolution of the concept of working memory. It explains that the expression of working memory was first used in the book Plans and the Structure of Behavior, which is widely acknowledged to be a milestone in the early development of cognitive psychology. The chapter discusses the production-system and associative-network models of working memory, and evaluates the relation between working memory and reading comprehension. It describes multicomponent models of working memory and explores the role of inhibitory processes in working-memory capacity.

This chapter examines an inhibition-resource approach in the analysis of working memory and information retrieval. It considers issues relevant in explaining individual difference in working-memory capacity and explains the underlying principle behind an inhibition-resource hypothesis of working-memory capacity. The chapter proposes a set of ideas called the General Capacity Theory to specify the mechanisms that mediate the relationship between working-memory capacity and higher-level cognitive tasks.

This chapter points to evidence from task-switching paradigms that a single flexible attentional resource may place limitations on working memory capacity. This limitation may vary up to a maximum of four chunks of information with sufficient practice on the task. It concludes by suggesting that the task-switching elements of the working memory span task may offer additional insight into the precise characteristics of this limited resource.

In this study we are concerned with measuring older individuals’ health capacity for work in Canada. As health improves and people live longer, to what extent are they able to work more? Of course, one’s capacity to work is not directly measurable. We take two separate and distinct approaches to measuring health capacity for work among older men and women in this study. The first uses age-specific mortality rates to proxy for overall health, comparing employment rates at similar levels of mortality. The second method uses a mix of health measures to estimate a health-employment relationship at ages 50 to 54, then uses these estimates to project the employment capacity of older workers. Our results suggest a substantial unused capacity for work among older Canadians.

Longevity is increasing and many people are spending a greater proportion of their lives reliant on pensions to support consumption. In response to this, several countries have mandated delays to age of first entitlement to pension benefits in order to reduce incentives to retire early. However, it is unknown to what extent older individuals have the health capacity to sustain the longer working lives that delayed pension benefits may encourage. We estimate the health capacity to work longer in Denmark by comparing how much older individuals work today with how much those with similar mortality rates worked in the past, and how much younger individuals today with similar self-assessed health work. We find substantial health capacity for longer working lives among those currently aged 55 and above. We also find significant heterogeneity by education and gender. Those with a high school degree have the greatest additional work capacity, women have more additional capacity than men, especially women with a college degree.

This is the introduction to the seventh phase of the international social security project. The project compares the experiences of twelve developed countries and uses differences in their retirement programs to explore their effects on retirement and related questions. Earlier phases find that: 1) incentives for retirement are correlated with labor force participation rates; 2) workers with stronger incentives to delay retirement are more likely to do so; and 3) changes to social security could affect labor force participation and government finances. The fourth volume explores whether higher employment among older persons increases youth unemployment, but finds no link. Recent volumes find that changes in disability insurance (DI) participation are more closely linked to DI reforms than to changes in health and that reducing access to DI would raise labor supply. This seventh phase explores whether older people are healthy enough to work longer. We use two main methods to estimate health capacity to work, asking how much older individuals today could work if they worked as much as those with the same mortality rate in the past or as younger individuals in similar health. Both methods suggest there is significant additional health capacity to work at older ages.

Previous waves of this project studied the effect of financial incentives created by formal and de facto (early) retirement programs on an individual’s decision to retire, the fiscal impact of such behavior and reforms’ impact thereon. Furthermore, the impact of (early) exits on youth employment and the respective roles of health and program rules as determinants of disability program enrollment have been studied. (Dellis et al. 2004; Desmet et al. 2007, Jousten et al. 2010, 2012, 2014). One aspect that most of these papers have essentially bypassed is work-capacity issues. We explore the link between health indicators and employment rates of the population aged 55 or more. Our focus lies on work capacity as a key determinant of employment. Using cohort mortality information as a proxy for overall health outcomes, we establish a substantial untapped work capacity in the population 55+. Even stronger results are obtained when relying on individual-level objective and subjective health and socioeconomic parameters as predictors.

The Belgian labor market has undergone profound changes, particularly for those over 50. There has been a steady increase in labor force participation for women since the early 1980s, but a decline for males in the same period, followed by a period of relative stability at low levels—both from a historical and from a cross-country perspective—and then a steady upward trend starting in the early to mid-1990. The paper studies the labor market participation of older workers in Belgium over the last three decades. It outlines the changes to the institutional framework of relevance for labor market participation and employment. Drawing on data from the European Union Labour Force Survey (LFS) over the period 1983 to 2013, we provide evidence of the trends in participation in (early-) retirement routes. We also explore how the jobs occupied by older workers have changed over time, both in terms of their “quality” and the “quantity” of work involved. Part-time work is found to become more common, though with different attributes for men and women.

The question of what individual differences in working memory capacity reflect has been a topic of intensive interest in research for several decades. This research has shed light on mechanisms underlying working memory performance. At the same time, the chapter authors argue this research has been myopic in two respects. First, it has largely ignored the influence of other predictor variables on complex task performance. Second, it has overlooked the importance of the environment as a co-determinant of performance. In this chapter, answering the seven questions put to contributors of this volume, the authors discuss their own research on working memory capacity and describe an ecological view of the working memory system that they believe will advance both research on working memory and the usefulness of findings from this research.

Similar to other OECD countries, labor force participation rates of Spanish older workers were falling until the mid-1990s when there was a reversal in the trend. Labor force participation rates of Spanish men have been increasing since then, although at a slower pace than in other OECD countries. We explore to what extent several factors can be behind these trends. First, we conclude that the (old-age) social security system (except perhaps for the disability component) has played a marginal (at most) role on this reversal given the lack of major changes in social security benefits until the last set of reforms in 2011 and 2013. Second, we also rule out that changes in the health status of the population are responsible for the reversal of this trend. Finally, we find that aggregate economic conditions, and differences across cohorts in both the skill composition and the labor force attachment of wives are potential drivers of these observed changes.

Chapter 4 explores ongoing debates in experimental syntax regarding the distinction between syntactic and processing-based effects on acceptability. Several types of arguments have figured prominently in the debates. Effects that have been claimed to favor a syntactic explanation include overgeneration of ungrammatical sentence types, cross-linguistic differences, resistance to repeated exposure effects, and resistance to individual differences in working memory capacity. Effects that have been claimed to favor a processing-based explanation include amelioration effects, isomorphism between acceptability ratings and time-sensitive measures such as reading time, repeated exposure effects, and effects of individual differences in working memory capacity. Each of these types of explanations is considered in turn, drawing on studies of syntactic islands, subject–verb agreement, missing VP illusions, and Superiority effects.

In this chapter, the authors argue that technical cognition can best be understood as a variety of expert performance, or expertise. Expert performances are grounded in a cognitive system in which well-learned routines and procedures held in long-term memory are rapidly accessed in working memory using retrieval structures, which are themselves well-learned sets of cues stored in long-term memory and activated in working memory. Retrieval structures provide a flexible, alinguistic form of thinking able to respond almost instantly to a huge variety of task-specific problems. However, expertise requires years of practice to attain. Technical expertise evolved over the course of hominin evolution primarily through the expansion of long-term memory, but also through the enhancement of working memory capacity. It was not until comparatively late in hominin evolution that archaeology provides examples of technical systems that required cognitive resources beyond the scope of expert cognition.

This chapter is based on a theoretical framework for the study of adult cognitive plasticity and on empirical findings from the COGITO Study. The design and analyses of the study include key features for producing and detecting transfer effects at the level of cognitive abilities. Among the features are: (a) an intensity and dosage of training that is likely to induce an enduring mismatch between functional supply and demand, which is conducive to plastic changes in cognitive abilities, and (b) a multivariate and heterogeneous battery of transfer tasks and sufficiently large samples to allow for the investigation of transfer of training at the level of latent factors. Younger adults showed short-term and long-term transfer effects for reasoning and episodic memory, whereas older adults showed only short-term transfer on a working memory (WM) latent factor composed of tasks that resembled the practiced tasks, something that younger adults did as well. The chapter discusses possible interpretations of the findings in terms of increases in WM capacity, improvements in the efficiency of material-independent or material-specific processes or strategies, and improvements in motivation and self-concept.

The Royal Society has in recent years taken a great interest in the growth of the world’s population and has been represented at the two big international congresses on this subject, in Delhi and in Cairo (Graham-Smith, 1994). According to U.N. projections, in 20 year’s time the world population will be between 7.5 and 8.5 billion (Demeny, 1996). There does not seem to be much controversy about these figures. On the other hand, when it comes to the question of whether it will be possible to feed these 8 billion people, opinions diverge widely between optimists and pessimists. McCalla (1995), the director of the Agriculture and Natural Resources Department of the World Bank, in a very illuminating discussion of the controversy, has said, “The economists are always wrong,” presumably because they have to deduce future trends from those of the past. It seemed to us that the best way to make a useful contribution is to look at the subject and assess the possibilities from an objective scientific point of view. The Royal Society has done this twice in the past, with two discussion meetings: one on Agricultural Efficiency (Cooke et al., 1977) and the other on Technology in the 1990s: Agriculture and Food (Blaxter and Fowden, 1985). Now, 10 years on, it is time to have another go, widening the scope of the recent discussion meeting “Land Resources: On the Edge of the Malthusion Precipice?” The late Kenneth Blaxter, in a scries of lectures called “People, Food and Resources,” published in 1986, recalled a quotation from Friedrich Engels, writing in 1844 about the Malthusian dilemma: “Science advances in proportion to the knowledge bequeathed to it by the previous generation and thus under the most ordinary conditions grows in geometrical progression — and what is impossible for science?” (my italics).

People expressing concern about the environmental resource basis of human life often take a global, futuristic view (see, e.g., Kennedy, 1993). They emphasize the deleterious effects that growing population and rising consumption would have on our planet in the future. They express worry that the increasing demand for environmental resources (such as agricultural land, forests, fisheries, fresh water, the atmosphere, and the oceans) and the resulting impacts on ecosystem services (such as regenerating soils, recycling nutrients, filtering pollutants, assimilating waste, pollinating crops, and operating the hydrological cycle) would make civilization unsustainable. This book is, at least in part, a response to this thought. Although the global, futuristic emphasis has proved useful, it has had two unfortunate consequences: it has encouraged us to adopt an all-or-nothing position (the future will be either catastrophic or rosy), and it has drawn attention away from the economic misery that is endemic in large parts of the world today. Disaster is not something for which the poorest have to wait: they face it right now, and nearly 1 billion people go to bed hungry each night, having been unable to escape from something that can be called a poverty trap. Moreover, in poor countries, decisions on fertility and on allocations concerning education, child care, food, work, health care, and the use of the local environmental resource base are in large measure reached and implemented within households. In earlier work (Dasgupta, 1993, 1995a, 1995b, 1996, 1997), I have tried to show that the interface that connects the problems of population growth, poverty environmental degradation, food insecurity, and civic disconnection should ideally be studied with reference to myriad communitarian, household, and individual decisions, or, in other words, that if we are to reach a global, futuristic vision of the human dilemma, we need to adopt a local, contemporary lens.