The Ontogenetic Course and Multicomponent Nature of Wise Reasoning Across the Adult Lifespan: Perspectives From Neuropsychology

Wisdom has long been revered as a desirable feature of aging in theoretical, folk, and lay discourse. In recent decades, there has been a surge of empirical psychological research on the association between wisdom and age, including the underlying cognitive mechanisms that may contribute to its expression. However, this remains an ongoing area of debate, with diverse and often conflicting views reported in the research literature. Further, less is known about how the cognitive architecture of wisdom may differ in younger and older adults. The current work aimed to empirically examine whether ‘older is wiser’, and the cognitive and neural substrates associated with wise reasoning in younger and older adulthood.

We begin with a systematic review and meta-analyses to quantify the current consensus in the literature regarding the relationship between general (insight into life in general) and personal (insight into oneself) wisdom with (i) cognition (Study 1) and (ii) age (Study 2). Study 1 included 22 studies for which outcomes were categorized into six cognitive domains to facilitate domain-specific meta-analyses: i) crystallized intelligence, ii) fluid intelligence, iii) general intellectual functioning, iv) memory, v) attention, and vi) executive function. We observed a significant positive effect of crystallized and fluid intelligence on wisdom, with the most robust effects observed for crystallized intelligence. Aggregate effect sizes in the remaining cognitive domains were null. Study 2 included 52 studies to examine the relationship between wisdom and age. There was a significant positive effect of age on wisdom, with larger effects observed for general versus personal wisdom.

Extending from these systematic reviews we next conducted two empirical studies. First, we examined associations among wisdom, age, and specific aspects of cognitive function implicated in wise reasoning (leveraging findings from Studies 1 and 2) in 344 neurologically healthy younger (n = 181) and older (n = 163) adults (Study 3). While older adults scored higher on measures of self-reported personal wisdom, performance-based general wisdom was stable across the adult lifespan. Memory was a stronger predictor of general than personal wisdom in the combined, young, and older adult samples, and this association was more robust in older adults.

Finally, in an exploratory analysis (Study 4), we examined relationships among wisdom, memory, and brain function (resting-state functional connectivity) in 286 neurologically healthy younger (n = 157) and older (n = 129) adults. General wisdom was associated with greater integration among frontoparietal (CONT) and default (DN) subnetworks than personal wisdom in the combined age sample. General wisdom in older adulthood was associated with more robust network dedifferentiation than in young, while the opposite pattern was observed for personal wisdom (i.e., greater within-network connectivity of CONT and DN regions in older than younger adulthood).

Taken together, these findings illustrate that older may be wiser, and critically depends on the problem-solving context (intra-personal versus extra-personal). Moreover, our findings provide converging evidence that personal and general wisdom are discrete abilities, with distinct age-related trajectories, cognitive determinants, and underlying neural architectures.