Specific manifestations of pragmatic cognition are said to differ from person to person as people proceed through selection, optimization, or compensation (Dittmann-Kohli and Baltes, 1990). Selection refers simply to diminishing the scope of one's activities to things that one is still able to accomplish well, despite a diminution in reserve capacity. Thus, research shows that elderly people tend to leave jobs that require quick sensorimotor responses (Barrett, Mihal, Panek, Sterns, and Alexander, 1977). Optimization refers to the fact that older people can maintain high levels of performance in some domains by practice, greater effort, and the development of new bodies of knowledge. Compensation comes into play when one requires a level of capacity beyond remaining performance potential. For example, Salthouse (1984) was able to show that older typists, although slower on several simple speeded reaction-time tasks, were able to compensate for this deficit and maintain their speed by reading further ahead in the text and planning ahead. According to Salthouse and Somberg (1982), age-related decrements at the "molecular" level (e.g., in speed of execution of the elementary components of typing skill) produce no observable effects at the "molar" level (i.e., the speed and accuracy with which work is completed).

Charness (1981) showed similar effects with older chess players, who exhibited poorer recall in general, but were better able to plan ahead than younger, less experienced players. In related studies, older adults have been found to compensate for declines in memory by relying more on external memory aids than do younger adults (Loewen, Shaw, and Craik, 1990). Older adults must often transfer the emphasis of a particular task to skills that have not declined in order to compensate for those that have (see Bäckman and Dixon, 1992, for a review of these issues). In other words, when a task depends heavily on knowledge, and speed of processing is not a significant constraint, peak performance may not be constrained in early-to-middle adulthood (Charness and Bieman-Copland, 1994). As an example, consider chess competitions by correspondence. In these "chess-by-mail" competitions, players are permitted three days to deliberate each move. The mean age of the first-time winners of one postal world championship is 46 years old. In contrast, the peak age for tournament chess, where deliberation averages three minutes per move, is about 30 years old (Charness and Bosman, 1995).

A series of studies on the relationship between aging and cognitive efficiency in skilled performers attested to the compensatory and stabilizing role of practical cognition (Baltes and Smith, 1990; Charness and Bosman, 1990; Colonia-Willner, 1998; Hartley, 1989; Willis, 1989). Sternberg and colleagues' studies of tacit knowledge in the domains of business management, sales, and academic psychology showed increases in tacit knowledge with age and experience across groups of undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals (Sternberg, Wagner, Okagaki, 1993; Wagner, 1987; Wagner, Rashotte, and Sternberg, 1994; Wagner and Sternberg, 1985). Colonia-Willner (1998) found evidence that older managers who performed at the highest levels on average had high levels of tacit knowledge—even though on average they had relatively low scores on psychometric reasoning measures. In addition, Colonia-Willner pointed out an interesting detail: even though tacit knowledge of managerial skills was shown to be related to some indicators of job success for the total sample of bank managers, the relative weight of this knowledge was higher for the highest success group (that group rewarded most highly). It might be that job-related tacit knowledge is especially important for detecting super-achievers among a fairly restricted, high-achieving, conventional population of managers engaged in heterogeneous activities.