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How do the relationships in our mind change across the lifespan? In some recent work with collaborators Haim Dubossarsky and Simon De Deyne, we investigated the way free associations changed as people aged from 8 to 80.
In a standard free association task, an individual is given a 'cue' and they respond with the first word that comes to mind, the 'target.' So I give you the cue, 'cat,' and you respond with the first word that comes to mind, 'dog.' Carl Jung loved this little game and believed it revealed deep secrets about your inner mojo.
In Dubossarsky et al (2017), we collected free associates from approximately 8,000 people, with each age group given the same 420 cue words. Then we took out our mathematical freak flag and built networks.
In the figure shown below, for approximately each 10-year age bin, we connect cue words (the red dots) with edges (the black lines) to form networks by linking together cues that share similar sets of targets. So words like 'cat' and 'dog' might share a link because both would produce target words like 'animal' and 'pet.'
What's remarkable about these networks is that they breathe. In early life, the associations show patterns that are largely disconnected with many words that are isolated (the little red dots without connections in the crescent). At about age 30, the giant component in the middle is at its most dense, indicating that the targets people produce are becoming more similar. In late life, the associations become less predictable again, as they were in early life.
It's well known that vocabulary increases across the lifespan. Older people know curious words like realpolitik and zaftig. But it's also well known that people have trouble accessing things from memory in late life as well. As the vocabulary grows into late life, it also becomes more difficult to find things in memory. The mind becomes a badly organized sock drawer.
Maybe that explains what looks like the three-day-old road kill of thought that spatters the 70-year-old's network. Or perhaps that's just the wisdom of knowing how things really work. It's hard to say.
There's more to it than all of this and I invite you to take a look at the article.
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