age, mental

n. Level of intellectual development as measured through a range of cognitive tasks and through comparison with chronological age peers. Mental age is most commonly used for the assessment of children and those with cognitive impairments, but also increasingly with older adults. Mental age can be expressed as the age at which that level of development is typically attained.
Alfred Binet, a French psychologist, developed a test to predict academic success accurately when the French government asked him to help them determine which children in the public schools would have difficulty with formal education. He and his colleague, Theodore Simon, found that tests of practical knowledge, memory, reasoning, vocabulary, and problem solving were better predictors of school success than the sensory tests that had been used previously. Participants were asked to perform simple commands and gestures, repeat spoken numbers, name objects in pictures, define common words, tell how two objects are different, and define abstract terms.
Assuming that children all follow the same pattern of development but develop at different rates, Binet and Simon created the concept of mental age, whereby, for example, a child of any age who scored as well as an average 12-year-old was said to have a mental age of 12. The intelligence test score also gives a clue to the child’s readiness to assume social responsibility by getting along with others, to his or her ability to care for himself/her- self, and to the level of play behavior he or she might be expected to show.    - TJM