Cognitive and biological ageing has become a fast-growing and dynamic area of study and research, and the scale of this acceleration in growth makes this new four-volume collection in the Psychology Press Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Psychology, especially timely.

A primary question is why we and all other complex animals and plants age, a question studied mainly by biologists, and Volume I ( Biological Bases of Ageing ) includes key research on models for ethological and evolutionary ageing. It also takes full account of the body of work on the genetics of animal and human ageing and on genes that directly cause, or that interact with environmental influences to cause, individual differences in the rate of age-related changes.

A quite distinct field of research has been the development of models for cognitive changes in the brain that are based entirely on behavioural evidence. Volume II ( Cognitive Ageing ) gathers together the most important work on the search for the neuropsychological bases of cognitive ageing and in so doing helps to make sense of the rapid growth of developments in this area.

The third volume in this collection ( Relating Cognitive Ageing to Brain Ageing ) makes available the most significant recent research on how the amounts and time-courses of gross age-related changes in local areas of the brain affect cotemporaneous global and local changes in cognitive performance.

Finally, the material collected in Volume IV ( The Effects of Health, Demographics and Social Conditions on Rates of Change in Old Age: Interpreting Data from Large Studies ) examines how the methodology of longitudinal studies and cross-sectional studies affects the conclusions that can be reached from each and explores recent statistical models to analyse complex data sets.

With comprehensive introductions to each volume, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in historical and scientific context, Psychology of Ageing is destined to be a vital work of reference. It will also be valued by scholars, students, and practitioners as a primary research resource.

In the World Library of Psychologists series, international experts present career-long collections of what they judge to be their most interesting publications - extracts from books, key articles, research findings, practical and theoretical contributions. Professor Patrick Rabbitt has been a prominent contributor to knowledge of cognitive performance and cognitive ageing for over half a century. He has made a range of significant contributions to geronotological research, from the development of information processing theories in the 1950s and 1960s to a new understanding of decision making and the ageing process in subsequent decades. This collection of his research articles represents a review of how work in cognitive performance and cognitive ageing has developed in the past 50 years. Whilst the nature of scientific research means that some of the questions posed have since been answered, Rabbitt adds introductory sections to articles which contextualise its place in the subject area and offer a personal view on the evolution of the field. This book is important because it provides a perspective on the development of cognitive research and the ageing process through the work of an active researcher in the field. It will interest all students and researchers interested in cognitive development and gerontology.

This volume reflects the pressure to develop useful models and methodologies to study executive behaviour - the ability to update information in working memory in order to control selective attention to formulate plans of action and to monitor their efficient execution. Many models are based on the concept of a single "central executive" that manges these functions; others propose a number of independent "working memory systems" that each serve one task or activity but not others.; This book is a collection of essays by active researchers who discuss their own work on the definition of "executive" or "controlled" behaviours, and on the relation of these behaviours to specific areas of the frontal cortex. The papers are particularly concerned with logical difficulties that arise in defining these functions that lead, in turn, to methodological difficulties in studying them. In particular, they discuss such problems as the low test-re-test reliability of tasks that have been used to define and explore "executive" behaviours, the limited validity of these tasks in predicting performance deficits, the poor localization of the changes observed with respect to underlying brain function, and the relation of performance on these tasks to individual difference in performance on measures of "global" or "general" intellectual ability such as Spearman's 1927 gf.; The authors discuss their own research on the relations between cognitive function and neuropsychology, on changes in executive competence in conditions such as closed head injuries or dementias that may diffusely affect the whole brain, and on changes in executive function in normal old age.

In the World Library of Psychologists series, international experts present career-long collections of what they judge to be their most interesting publications - extracts from books, key articles, research findings, practical and theoretical contributions. Professor Patrick Rabbitt has been a prominent contributor to knowledge of cognitive performance and cognitive ageing for over half a century. He has made a range of significant contributions to geronotological research, from the development of information processing theories in the 1950s and 1960s to a new understanding of decision making and the ageing process in subsequent decades. This collection of his research articles represents a review of how work in cognitive performance and cognitive ageing has developed in the past 50 years. Whilst the nature of scientific research means that some of the questions posed have since been answered, Rabbitt adds introductory sections to articles which contextualise its place in the subject area and offer a personal view on the evolution of the field. This book is important because it provides a perspective on the development of cognitive research and the ageing process through the work of an active researcher in the field. It will interest all students and researchers interested in cognitive development and gerontology.

The Aging Mind offers an accessible introduction to what research has revealed about how our bodies and brains age, and how these changes affect our everyday experiences and lives. This second edition is fully updated with contemporary studies and neuroscientific findings, to offer an engaging exploration of 25 facets of the physical and mental aging processes. Written by eminent gerontologist Patrick Rabbitt, who interprets research through his own personal daily experiences, it explores what aging really is and how to accept and manage it. It explores why our sensory and cognitive experiences change as we get older, and what these developments mean for our overall physical and emotional well-being. Key topics explored include memory, intelligence, attention, sleep, vision and hearing, taste and smell, touch and balance, anxiety, depression and perception of the passage of time. It also discusses how far we can keep and develop the skills we have mastered over our lifetimes. The Aging Mind debunks unhelpful myths about the aging process and offers guidance on how we can age better, allowing us to continue to manage and enjoy our lives. This second edition is invaluable for students and researchers of cognitive gerontology, for professionals working with clients experiencing issues around aging, and for all those interested in understanding their own, or their relatives' aging.

The Aging Mind offers an accessible introduction to what research has revealed about how our bodies and brains age, and how these changes affect our everyday experiences and lives. This second edition is fully updated with contemporary studies and neuroscientific findings, to offer an engaging exploration of 25 facets of the physical and mental aging processes. Written by eminent gerontologist Patrick Rabbitt, who interprets research through his own personal daily experiences, it explores what aging really is and how to accept and manage it. It explores why our sensory and cognitive experiences change as we get older, and what these developments mean for our overall physical and emotional well-being. Key topics explored include memory, intelligence, attention, sleep, vision and hearing, taste and smell, touch and balance, anxiety, depression and perception of the passage of time. It also discusses how far we can keep and develop the skills we have mastered over our lifetimes. The Aging Mind debunks unhelpful myths about the aging process and offers guidance on how we can age better, allowing us to continue to manage and enjoy our lives. This second edition is invaluable for students and researchers of cognitive gerontology, for professionals working with clients experiencing issues around aging, and for all those interested in understanding their own, or their relatives' aging.

The worldwide demographic explosion in numbers of older people makes the study of cognitive change in old age of obvious practical interest. It is also theoretically crucial because it demands models for cognitive change that can explain how some cognitive skills are retained while others are lost and how tasks that we once performed superbly well are compromised by biological changes in the brain. A striking weakness of models in contemporary Experimental Cognitive Psychology is that they only describe functional systems that cannot occur in nature because they do not alter with practice, or during childhood development and age-related decline, and are identical in all individuals. Cognitive Gerontologists are deprived of such convenient fictions because their hope is to explain how we gradually become less competent at things that we once did extraordinarily well. They encounter the quite different, and salutary, difficulty that calendar time, the dimension in terms of which old and young people are conventionally differentiated, only indicates the maximum period within which an enormous range of disparate changes can have occurred. These changes certainly include poorly-understood processes of "normal" or "usual" ageing but also the cumulative effects of the pathologies and biological life events that, to varying degrees, affect our brains. The papers in this special issue, all by leading researchers, highlight the important practical and theoretical advances in the understanding of the impact of these changes in the ageing brain on the ageing of our cognition.