Diagnosing Older Adults

Selective memory retrieval is research to try and recall events that occurred in your past life. In their studies, they used sixty-four participants between the age of (20-35) for the younger generation and for the 64 participants their age was over sixty. They then proceeded to show each group certain images to remember. Both groups showed a very poor retrieval to the images portrayed. For the most part, this initial test between the young and older ages was unsuccessful. Since, this experiment didn’t go as planned they came up with a new process. That process being to have a much wider group is participants. Having the participants between the age of (40-85) drastically changed the results of the experiment. Critically, the size of the beneficial but now the detrimental effect of retrieval decreased with age and this age-related decline was mediated by individuals working memory capacity, as measured by the complex operation span task. (Aslan, A., Schlichting, A., John, T., & Bauml, K. T., 2015) In this study it showed that there was an early decline in the older generation memory compared to the younger

There are people who think that older adults are not capable of learning new information because of the number of neurons in their brain decline as they age. In the PBS video “Stealing Time”, the old cage potato rats were given a change of scene with an enriched environment and the results were that their dendrites grew and made new synaptic connections where there were none before. These rats were better on future tasks than the old rats that were not given a change of scene. When older adults are doing a task in a laboratory setting they are less efficient at processing the information presented to them and their reaction time is slower. “Older adults show more brain activity between the prefrontal cortex and the medial temporal lobe than

A topic I learned more of this semester in regards to the older population was dementia. Some loss in memory function is an inevitable consequence of aging, and as one ages, it takes more time to process information and retrieve memories. However, "Dementia is a general term that refers to progressive, degenerative brain dysfunction, including deterioration in memory, concentration, language skills, visuospatial skills, and reasoning, that interferes with a person's daily functioning" (Mauk, 2014, p. 377). This loss of mental skills affects the ability to function over time, causing problems with memory and how one thinks, impacting these individual's overall quality of life.

No significant effect was found for false recall and recognition, p = .20 and p = .94, respectively. There were no significant findings in the Group x List Type for false recall and recognition. There was a significant effect of list type for true recall and true recognition, p = .01 and p = .07.

If people make a list of tasks to do in a week, one will most likely do the ones they find most relevant first and then the least important. The same thing happens with the memory; people have a tendency to remember things based on their importance. Previous research has been done comparing young adults and older adults’ memory based on the intention-superiority effect and as the results suggested young adults scored higher in remembering the things they were going to do compared with the things they already did. This same study was replicated with undergraduate students. In the present study, the aim was to investigate if this effect occurs in older adults compare to Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients. They hypothesized that the number of tasks the participants would remember

Median spends two sections to explain the rule of memory in his website. Repetition at the right time is the key for both of short-term memory and long-term memory, because the memories that are encoded by automatic processing could easily recall, such as emotional memories; for effortful processing, it requires numerous repetition, especially for important things or tasks at work or school, which need to be repeated many time to memorise. He claims that complicating things is one of the ways to strength memory, but forgetting allows people to prioritise events. However, whether his method works for elderly people or not, if the things are complex, it is obviously that seniors will feel harder to memorise.

Older adults are thus slower in receiving information through sensory receptors, slower in transmitting, processing, and interpreting information, and are slower in acting upon it” (Shulman, Silverman, & Golden).

There are also cognitive changes during middle adulthood. There is a mixed pattern of positive and negative changes in cognitive abilities. Processing speed starts to decrease during this time period however crystallized thought does not decline until older age (pg. 456). Working memory begins to decline however semantic memory continues to increase as we learning throughout our older years (ph 456). Usually most memory decline is during older age and can be attributed to Alzheimer’s disease of dementia.

Many studies have been broad, studying the vocabulary, reasoning, memory, and speed of the person, but zoning in on one thing specific may lead to further understanding. Studying the effects of cognitive aging in relation to memory possibly will open so many more areas of study. Studying specific age groups could also be helpful when attempting to understand cognitive aging as a whole. Learning about how speed, memory, vocabulary, and reasoning all work within a child, 10-15 years old, might be helpful when comparing that data to that information of an adult. between 50-60 years

As people age the reaction time significantly deteriorates causing slower stimulus responses. Seen in figure 1, the values displayed a direct relationship, which showed reaction time worsened with age. This may be due to the “white” matter also known as the myelin sheath is slowly dispersing, this then may lead to slower brain power. The myelin sheath which creates faster brain access for neurons, gradually exacerbates with age because between the age brackets of 0-30 the brain is at full arousal but after the age of 30 the brain starts to slowly degrade, causing lose of power and speed to respond quickly. This clearly showed that reaction is heavy associated with age. Another trend seen in the graph is that between the age of 30 and under

However, we also take into account that different findings may be due to different assessment methods since some study included questionnaires of relatives and others use assessment tools. Therefore, it is important to know how reliable are, because we cannot expect that tools that measure different aspects of memory to correlate in a significant way with each

Inhibition deficit model contend that there is decreased efficiency of inhibitory processes that keep focal attention free of irrelevant information decrease with age. Such processes disrupt successful completion of a task and older adults are more consumed by distractors in a given task. Hence, increased inhibitory deficits engage working memory more among older adults and so they allow more irrelevant stimuli to reach conscious awareness (Graham & Burke, 2011).

Many studies have measured memory and word recall in relation to cognitive ability and age by using list learning tests and multitrial (Garvett & Horwitz, 2012; Krueger & Salthouse, 2013). The positioning of

Besides this, prior research has also demonstrated that serial recall is dependent on age. When performing free recall tasks, young adults tend to begin recall with items appearing at the end of the lists (Howard & Kahana, 1999). In the immediate serial recall tasks (ISR), performance on ISR is characterized by extended primacy effects and small recency effects (Tan, 2008). Serial position effect is expected to generalize

These practices are helpful because older people often take longer to learn than younger people (Williams, 2016). Although natural brain changes occur with age, the brain is still capable of regrowth and relearning (“Memory and Aging”, 2017). The process of learning new information is more apparent in older persons who participate in regular exercise and those who practice regular intellectual stimulation (“Memory and Aging”, 2017). Research suggests that those persons who have less cardiovascular risk are more likely to have better cognitive function as they age (Brickman & Stern, 2009). In older adults, semantic memory improves regularly throughout life (“Memory and Aging”, 2017). Research states, “Semantic memory is the ability to recall concepts and general facts that are not related to specific experiences” (“Memory and Aging”, 2017). An example of this is knowing the function of everyday household items such as a clock to tell time or a stove to cook food (“Memory and Aging”, 2017). Semantic language also includes processes that have been learned at a young age and throughout life such as vocabulary and language (“Memory and Aging”, 2017). Procedural memory stays the same as well throughout one’ life (“Memory and Aging”, 2017). Research states, “Procedural memory is the memory of how to do things such as tell time by reading the numbers on a clock” (“Memory and Aging”, 2017). The form of memory that changes over time is episodic memory (“Memory and Aging”, 2017). Research states, “Episodic memory captures the what, where, and when of our daily lives” (“Memory and Aging”,