Impacts of being old on thinking and decision-making:
- The elderly use less optimal strategies
- When there is a high degree of working memory required, older adults perform worse
- However, in real world situations older adults have time to make decisions, they can rely on others and use strategies to help mitigate their decline
- In general, older people are able to take more information in to account when making decisions
-They have an increased ability to think in hypothetical ways and integrate life experiences - Integration of emotion
better able to combine emotion and logic with their emotions take context into account
ex. An older person asked an ethics question can critically think about the issue better. Make choice combined with empathy, pragmatics and logic.
What are 6 Age-related Differences in Decision-Making?
- Require less information to make a decision and search for less info (life experiences)
- Tend to avoid risk and choose safer options
- Use less details and just skip to “the bottom line” (get the gist of the information)
- Often feel overwhelmed by too much info or options
- May expect or rely on support from friends, family, and professionals for big decisions
- When asked to evaluate their options, they focus more on positive information rather than negativity
What makes expert? What are expert traits?
When does expertise peak? What are age-related changes to epertise?
- What makes an expert: How they handle a problem. Experts accumulate knowledge about alternate ways to solve problems or make decisions in their area of expertise.
- Expert traits: more creative and flexible than novices, superior ability
- Expertise peaks in middle age then declines
- Age-related changes: Even if elderly people can no longer physically do the tasks they were once experts in, their reasoning usually stays expert
What do Older adults do/need in order to learn?
- Understand why they have to learn something
*Enter with more experience
*Be more willing to learn about more concrete things than abstract things
*Motivated by real world factors-less by hypothetical situations
*Be more motivated by internal factors (personal satisfaction) than external factors ($$)
What are the 4 traditional characteristics of wisdom
- Deals with important matters of life and the human condition
- Superior knowledge, judgment, and advice
- Extraordinary scope, depth, and balance
- Well-intended and combines mind & virtue
What are the two types of processing?
Automatic:
- Doesn’t require lots of memory or effort
- Includes Muscle memory
- It’s difficult to alter
- Some are prewired into the brain
- Often starts as effortful
Effortful:
- Higher demand level (takes more energy and attention)
- You are aware of doing the task
- Older people struggle more with these tasks -Why?- they suck at mental multitasking
What are the 8 types of memory?
Sensory: 5 senses
Working: Holds and works with information in order to perform a task (ex. writing down a phone number you were just told).
- Worsens with age
Short term: Short-term memory briefly holds small amounts of information (don’t really do something with it)
Long term
Episodic: Daily life events (ex. what you ate for breakfast)
- old people struggle with this one the most
- personal events
Procedural: Muscle memory or ingrained, you don’t really think about it much
Semantic: Facts or knowledge (ex. how many months in a year)
Autobiographical: Knowledge about self
stronger when about memories with high emotions (last into old age)
What are some long term memory changes with aging, and when do they happen?
- Episodic: declines at about 65
- Semantic: 35 to 55 (peaks) decline: 65
- Tip of the tongue feeling : increases after 65
Why is semantic more stable than episodic?
- Episodic requires more working memory than semantics
How is the encoding process effected by age?
- This decline is related to a decline in automatic strategy use (ex. chunking, visualizing)
- There are also changes in brain activity
- You can see this on fMRI (evidence of compensatory brain activity)
- Issues in encoding cause memory issues
(can’t remember what you didn’t save)
How is the retrieval process effected by age?
- When you have issues encoding, you can’t retrieve
- The prefrontal cortex and hippocampus communicate less (the retrieval process is slowed down and stuff gets lost in translation)
- We have less extensive neural networks-sometimes the compensation they provide still isn’t enough to be able to retrieve a memory
What are two things that help the aging brain stay healthy?
- Regular physical exercise!
(big and strong-raw)
- This reduces age related brain atrophy
- increases neural plasticity
- intervention alternative for diseases and normative decline
- Increases grey matter volume - Multilingualism
- Protective against cognitive decline (the more languages the better)
-
What are some strategies to help deal with memory lose?
- Use familiar material to learn new things
- Practice!
- Learn compensatory strategies
What are the primary aspects of the information processing model?
- Study of how people take in things they see (stimuli) from their environment and transform them into memories
- Sensory Information input (downloading a file):
- use the 5 senses
- spacial awareness - Encoding (making file into accessible format):
- transforming info into a way that can be
connected to previous memories or stuff they already know - Storage (save):
- Moving info into long term memory - Retrieval:
- Remembering
What are the basic components of attention?
Attention is linked to the integration of processing in the parietal and frontal lobes
- This link changes with age
- Attentional processes are also influenced
by our ability to sustain our focus and the speed we can take in the information
How does processing speed relate to cognitive aging?
Speed of processing is how fast and efficient first steps of info processing are completed
- It gets slower with age
What is automatic processing? What is effortful processing?
Automatic processing: processes that are fast, reliable and insensitive to increased cognitive demands.
- prewired (never really needed attention)
- Hard to change
- Unaware of the process, don’t think about it
ex. Muscle memory
Effortful processing: requires all the available attentional capacity.
- task takes conscious attention
(takes effort)
What is sensory memory?
Sensory memory briefly holds information from our senses, like sights and sounds, for just a few seconds.
quickly lost
What are processing resources?
Processing resources is the amount of attention an individual has to apply to a particular situation.
Why do older adults have reduced performance on attention tasks?
(Two Theories)
Inhibitory loss: They can no longer “tune out” irrelevant information when they are processing stuff
Attentional resources: Older adults struggle to divide their attention while multitasking on a complex task. They focus on the task that is more important to them, and performance on the other task suffers.
What is working memory?
- The processes and structures involved in holding information in mind while simultaneously using that information, to solve a problem, make a decision, or learn new information
- We use rehearsal in order to hold information in working memory
ex. repeat stuff over and over again - It declines with age but, more of a decline in spatial working memory than in verbal
Within long-term memory, how do implicit and explicit memory, and episodic and semantic memory, performance differ across age?
Implicit: Effortless and unconscious recollection of information
ex. procedural memory that allows you to ride a bike
Minimal age effects
Explicit: Conscious and intentional recollection
More effected by age
Episodic: knowledge tied to specific events or experiences from our lives with contextual details about when, where, and how they occurred.
- lets us replay personal moments
- More emotion =more memorable
- stable until 55-60
-decline at 65
-binding deficit
Semantic: knowledge not tied to specific events
ex. facts language concepts
- increase 35 to 55
- decline 65 (not as much as episodic)
What age differences have been found in encoding and retrieval?
Encoding:
- gets worse with age because of a decline in adult’s spontaneous use of strategies while learning new information
ex. grouping associating mental images, organizing information
Retrieval:
- If encoded poorly, can’t retrieve well
- Prefrontal cortex and hippocampus don’t work as effectively together
- less neuro network connections (must compensate)
**older adults process information differently in order to compensate for normal age related changes- The issue with memory is that these compensations aren’t enough
What is long term memory?
Remembering something over time.
- Not one specific spot in the brain - it happens kinda all over
- Involves interactions among the prefrontal cortex, medial temporal lobe, and ventral posterior parietal cortex.
