Reaching peak performance?

From this paper – Comparative longitudinal structural analyses of the growth and decline of multiple intellectual abilities over the life span.

On a related if tangential note; I tend to do better on some of the measures included than I do on others. I tend to do well on some of the kinds of measures of intellectual ability – and/or (depending on who you ask..) measures which correlate significantly with intellectual ability – that are relatively easily observable, and I think some people, including some of the readers of this blog, overestimate me for that reason. There are people out there who can calculate the inverses of 2 3×3 matrices, then proceed to calculate the Kronecker product of the matrices and then move on to finally calculate the determinant of the resulting 9×9 matrix in a ridiculously short amount of time, and/or perhaps even without writing anything down along the way. I’m not one of those people and there are a lot of people in between me and them. (Now, you might argue that such an ability is easily observable but the kind of observability I have in mind here is one which relates to the social context.)

Incidentally, I did not blog this back when I originally read it (via MR; Tabarrok posted another graph which sparked a lot of debate) and now’s as good a time as any to post it here:

Here’s another one from the same presentation: