What is meant by multidirectionality?
- Even within a single domain of human experience, development can involve changes in different directions
- “Diversity or pluralism are evident in the directionality of ontogenetic change”
- (There isn’t just one single path of development)
- Even within the same developmental period, some systems of behavior show increases in functioning, while others show decreases
What is the difference between crystallised and fluid abilities?
- crystallised- factual knowledge- intellegence as cultural knowledge, culture-dependent, experience-based
- fluid- intelligence as basic information processing, universal, biological, genetically predisposed
How can the choice of research method in ageing affect outcomes?
Cross-sectional (snapshots) vs Longitudinal (same people and look at them over a period of time)
- from cross sectional, data gets progressively worse as ages increase and not consistent
- tradjectory in longitudinal seems flatter, more consistent, abilities improve a bit as you get older then decline
- niether one better than another
What is the risk of longtudinal?
- certain type of person likely to continue all the way in the study (organised), makes it less representative, this isn’t an issue with cross-sectional
What is the study by Verhaeghen on semantic memory?
- asked to choose synonyms of diffiuclt words
- semantic memory (been exposed to and able to attain)
- Older adults substantially outperform younger adults on vocabulary tests – especially multiple-choice tests
What was the semantic memory study on questions asked in 1980 and 2013? Eich et al
- showed questions most people would know and some that it is unlikely people know
- testing semantic memory because you either know or don’t
- older adults still did better
- compared correct answers from 1980 to 2013
- concluded semantic knowledge influenced by the environment around us because the year affected if they knew the answers to the question, change with time, location and social group
What was Maylor et al study on semantic memory?
2 part quiz:
- First, contestants answer questions on their chosen specialized subject
- Then, they answer general knowledge questions
- ran a survey of previous mastermind contestants to see how well performance correlates with age (age range 25-78)
- greater correlation with age for knowledge rather than for specialised subject
What is Laver and Burkes study on semantic memory and ageing?
- Semantic memory is seen as being an associative network of spreading activation
- Because of their breadth of experience and education opportunities…
- …Older adults may have a more densely populated network of semantic memory
- people respond faster to semantically associated words than unassociated words
- semantic priming is intact in older age and in fact even slightly improves
What is the brain structure behind semantic memory?
- Semantic memory is enabled by a diffuse network of different brain regions
- These brain regions are shared with other sensory/perception and motor/action areas
- Semantic memory is less dependent on brain areas known to decline in older age (such as the hippocampus)
What is an example of fluid intelligence?
- being able to use abstract reasoning in novel situations
- This requires us to process and make inferences about novel information…
- …and so we cannot rely on previously acquired knowledge to give us the correct answer
How is episodic memory an example of fluid intelligence?
- ## Episodic Memory is a type of long-term memory that allows us to recall specific personal experiences
In what two ways can we measure episodic memory?
- recollection- Retrieving the specific contextual, associative, perceptual etc. details an event
- familiarity- Memory in the absence of retrieving specific details, e.g., “It just feels familiar”; “It rings a bell”
What is an experiment measuring encoding vs retrieval? McCabe et al
- present words at encoding
- present some of the same words that appeared and some that didn’t, they had to say whether they had seen them before or not
- Accurate recollection declines in older age, but accurate familiarity is intact.
- False recollection and false familiarity both increase in older age.
How do brain regions change with age? Raz et al
Brain regions that reduce in volume with age
- caudate nucleus
- lateral prefrontal cortex
- cerebellar hemispheres
- hippocampus
Brain regions that are stable or show minimal reduction in volume with age:
- primary visual cortex
- entorhinal cortex
- Brain regions like the hippocampus and caudate nucleus decline in structural integrity, whereas the entorhinal cortex remains stable.
What is dual process theory and ageing? Yonelinas
- Researchers measured the volume of specific memory-relevant brain areas…
- …and also took measures of recall memory and recognition memory…
- …to see whether the two things were associated
- A double dissociation was found
- Hippocampal volume was strongly associated with recall
- Entorhinal cortex volume was strongly associated with recognition
What are the 3 theories of ageing and episodic memory?
- Dual process
theory (good at familiarity, poorer at recollection) - Associative deficit hypothesis (worse at memory for association, good at memory for individual items)
- Source monitoring framework (poorer memory for source and context, less deficient in memory for specific content/items)
What was Jarjat et als experiment on interaction between memory systems?
- This study compared memory performance in younger adults and older adults – and crucially, it looks at episodic memory and semantic memory together
- Participants were asked to study pairs of words
- They were asked (i) to remember the pairs, and (ii) to decide whether the words in each pair were semantically related
- They were then given a recognition test
- For words they thought they’d seen before, they had to report:
- Whether it was presented as a related pair or an unrelated pair
- Whether it had appeared on the left or the right
- FOUND: Memory for meaningful source information is preserved in older age
- use their intact semantic memory to compensate for decline in episodic
How do fluid abilities (e.g., episodic memory, EM) change with age?
EM declines across the lifespan, with deficits greatest for arbitrary associative/bound information that requires explicit recollection
How do crystallized abilities (semantic memory, SM) change with age?
SM improves across the lifespan due to acquired education/life experience and age-impaired brain areas being less involved in SM
What is processing speed?
- Processing speed is a basic property of our cognitive systems
- It’s not an ability that we can practice and get better at
- All cognitive tasks reflect the processing speed of that system
- Processing speed is a key constraint on cognitive processes – and it declines as we get older
How does processing speed constrain cognition?
- There’s only a limited time to execute cognitive operations on information in working memory before that information is lost
- Slower processing speed means that fewer cognitive operations get carried out in that time
- This in turn means there’s a reduction in the amount of simultaneously available information
- So, as processing speed slows with age, it impacts cognition
How did Chen and Li investigate processing speed?
- click space bar as see a shape
- as they get more complex, the correlation with ageing increases
- Speed difference may not be the cause, but rather a consequence of, the age difference in WM capacity
- We might be slower to do things if we can’t keep them in mind well
- Speed-accuracy trade-off: older adults typically prioritise accuracy over speed compared to younger adults (Starns & Ratcliff, 2010)
What is the difference between older and younger adults WM?
- Older adults tend to have lower WM capacity than younger adults (e.g., Bopp & Verhaeghen, 2005).
What is the arrow span task? What did Park and Payer find?
- see arrow sequence and remember direction they are pointing in, have to reproduce
- repeated with letters (more WM because had to store and convert to arrow direction)
- Steeper decline in WM tasks compared to STM tasks with increasing age
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Introduction to atypical development30
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Identifying atypical development17
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Diagnosing atypical development25
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Therapies and interventions14
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Gender identity and sexuality in neurodevelopmental conditions25
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Gender and Diagnosis27
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Current issues30
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Adulthood and neurodevelopment33
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Sensation in autism29
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Lifespan perspective and socioemotional processing in older age34
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Cognitive ageing28
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Ageing and physiology29
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Applied themes in ageing35
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Prelinguistic and lexical development32
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Using sentences and atypical language development29
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Individual differences in language development, socioeconomic circumstances and early language interventions11
