title: All data collection and analysis methods have limitations: reply to Rabbitt (2011) and Raz and Lindenberger (2011).
abstract: The commentaries on my article contain a number of points with which I disagree but also several with which I agree. For example, I continue to believe that the existence of many cases in which between-person variability does not increase with age indicates that greater variance with increased age is not inevitable among healthy individuals up to about 80 years of age. I also do not believe that problems of causal inferences from correlational information are more severe in the cognitive neuroscience of aging than in other research areas; I contend instead that neglect of these problems has led to confusion about neurobiological underpinnings of cognitive aging. I agree that researchers need to be cautious in extrapolating from cross-sectional to longitudinal relations, but I also note that even longitudinal data are limited with respect to their ability to support causal inferences.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4400, USA. salthouse@virginia.edu
authors.forename: Timothy A
authors.initials: TA
authors.lastname: Salthouse
mesh_terms: D000375:Aging / Q000473:pathology*; D001921:Brain / Q000473:pathology*; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000473:pathology*; D006801:Humans