Circadian Rhythm: Young adults perform better in the afternoon, older adults prefer the morning

"Circadian arousal patterns, reported as time-of-day preferences, differ with age. In general, children are more likely to report being at their best earlier in the day, whereas young adults typically reach their peak later in the day. Interestingly, time of-day-preferences change once more with increasing age, with older adults reverting to a strong preference for morning times," Dr. Constanze Hahn (Bochum) reports.

"The synchrony effect refers to the beneficial effect of a match between task demands and preferred time of day. A series of studies conducted with younger and older adults documented declines in performance from optimal to non-optimal times of day, and data suggest that performance is better when individuals are assessed at their optimal rather than their non-optimal time.

In these experiments, older adults were typically morning types and younger adults were usually evening types, with testing conducted either early in the morning or late in the afternoon. For both younger and older adults, better performance was observed at optimal times of day compared to non-optimal times of day in numerous tasks, including recognition performance, verbal problem solving, diverse working memory tasks, long-term memory, false memory, and response-inhibition. In all these studies, young adults showed better performance in the afternoon compared to the morning, while older adults tended to perform better in the morning than the afternoon."

Chronobiology and Chronopsychology
Baudson, T.G.; Seemüller, A.; Dresler, M. (Eds.)