Massive Attention In Older Adults

One of the strengths of this approach is that it looks at thought processes which are ignored by other psychologists. Such processes are memory, attention and perception and have been studied to have an effect on behavior.

This experiment in my opinion was useful to psychology. But I don’t agree with the methods that were applied. The researchers taught some behaviours to the monkeys that unless humans never show them how to do they will never do it by themselves, like

P3: Explain ways in which health and social care workers support the independence and wellbeing of older people. M2: Assess ways in which health and social care workers support the independence and wellbeing of older people. D1: Evaluate ways in which the sectors work together to support the independence and wellbeing of older people. Doris has stayed connected with her friend Frieda who lives on her own independently but recently she has had a fall and she has been referred to the local authorities. P1& M2 When promoting independence and wellbeing in older people it has to be done in a way where the person feels that they are able to do what they are being asked to do and if they say that they don’t

In the novel The Invisible Gorilla: How our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, a deeper way of how the mind works is shown. The authors explain what they call the “illusion of attention” by providing experiments and illustrations. The message being passed is that we as humans might think we are always aware of our surroundings, but we actually miss what is right in front of us. People usually focus on one thing at a time, therefore the unexpected goes unnoticed. The book explains how the brain only focuses on the object or area you are concentrating on, making you “blind” to everything else. Many experiments were held to prove to the readers that our intuition deceives us.

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

Gorilla, My Love," by Toni Bambara, demonstrates how adults often undermine children and do not take them seriously due to the adults automatic assumption that because they are younger, they are also uneducated; therefore unable to be on the adults level of maturity and intelligence. One way that "Gorilla, My Love" shows how adults undermine children is when the wrong movie played in the theater. Hazel was with her friend Big Brood and Baby Jason and they start booing once a different movie played than what was expected and the guy

This often occurs in domestic settings, so this makes detection limited. Unlike abused children that see different people throughout their daily routine, older adults may not see anyone besides their abuser. They may not see anyone outside of their homes until they go see their doctor, or have to go to the emergency room. The most commonly reported abuse is self-neglect. Elder self-neglect is the inability of an older adult to arrange for what they need for a safe and independent living (Halphen, 2014). They are often found living alone with untreated medical conditions and little social support. Older adults may not have sufficient appreciation of their circumstances nor the ability to make decisions about their living arrangements. They

However, the rats did not show difficulty when finding the reward when there was only target bowls (which are also called feature singulate). This shows that scopolamine, which is a antagonist to acetylcholine affects a rat's ability to distinguish feature conjunction stimuli but not feature singulate. The second experiment (human subjects) yielded relatively the same results in regard to attention. The results showed that individuals did not tend to have difficulty with the full attention condition, but the divided attention condition showed that the individuals had difficulty in choosing the correct response (Botly, et al., 2008). The results from each experiment mimic one another, not in the exact same way due to the variables that were being manipulated are not exactly the same but they do show essentially the same

The Invisible Gorilla emphasizes how oblivious we are to certain aspects of society when faced with a situation at hand. Chabris and Simons constantly reinforce how our minds fall into traps when we do not realize our surroundings. When we are so focused on something, we have no idea of our surroundings. So, if say a gorilla were to come into our field of vision we would not be able to recognize it because our minds are preoccupied with a different task. Chabris and Simons wrote this book to inform the public about how we are clueless at times to some of the most obvious things.

The Invisible Gorilla is a book that describes the everyday illusions we persistently experience and act upon. The basis of the book stems from the “Gorillas in our Midst” experiment conducted by authors Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. In this experiment, they had volunteers watch a video of two teams, one wearing white shirts and the other wearing black shirts, passing a basketball. The volunteers were asked to carefully count the number of passes made by the white team while ignoring any passes by the black team. The purpose of the study, however, was not to gauge how well they could count basketball passes, but to see if they would notice a person wearing a gorilla suit who stopped in the middle of the players and thumped their chest halfway through the video.

It was a surprising finding to see that most of the participants in the study were not able to recognize the gorilla or person change. These experiments provide valuable insight on the way we perceive our environments that may challenge our intuitive thinking. The brain is receiving a lot of different stimuli simultaneously and it is worth understanding how it processes this stimuli and which stimuli gets more attention than others. When people are focusing on a task they prioritize the task at hand which is why the people who were focused on the ball or filling out the papers failed to noticed changes in the environment. Like the video suggested it is important to learn what are the differences between people who recognized the gorilla/change

Throughout my experience with this observation on elderly individuals I noticed that every single one that I had interaction with gave a blink stare as if they were lost or confused. I thought that it might just be because they are old that they all kind of give that blankness to others but then I asked myself "are these elderly people really confused or is it the rest of us putting them in different social group by generalizing their age?" I believe older people are put in to a different group of people that get attention and categorized as "frail" and in need of help due to their less ability to do things on their own. This is an example of social role "a set of expected activities and responsibilities that go along with a position we hold in a social network" (Morgan, Pg. 90).

Differences have been found for same race and majority group (Pavan, 2011). These findings support previous fmri studies (2001 Golby), and memory recognition studies (Meissner & Brigham, 2001) suggesting an expertise in processing and recognising people from the same or majority race. Age related differences have found older adults gaze follow less than younger adults. However, the effect was the same for non-social stimuli, suggesting a general decline in the attentional system (Slessor, Phillips, and Bull 2008). A study supporting this premise found no difference in overt gaze following between younger and older adults, although there were reflexive differences with younger adults being faster and exhibiting more anticipatory saccades (Kuhn 2015). An own-age gaze cueing bias for younger adults, but not for older adults, was found when using face stimulus with younger and older faces (Slessor 2010). This is in line with EEG memory recognition studies which also found an own-age bias (OAB) for young adults (Wiese et al., 2008) suggesting that younger adults have expertise for people of their own age group whilst older adults do not share this bias. However, individual differences in gaze viewing strategies between age groups has been noted (children, adults and the elderly), with children using more exploratory bottom-up processing and with age moving to predominately top-down processing (Acik 2010). This could account for the slower response times for older adults as well as a lack of

The aim of this study is to see the impact of mind wandering in older adults specifically when reading. An experimental study was done to see if older adults mind wandered more than young adults. Different models suggested different outcomes such as the executive view suggests older adults mind wander more than young adults, whereas the decoupling hypothesis suggests that older adults should mind wander less than young adults. Research also shows that how much task-unrelated thoughts occur may be due to how interesting the text in question is. The first experiment tested accuracy between the accounts of younger and older adults in relation to their working memory. Older adults tested lower to mind wandering using the probe caught method,

In my opinion older adults cope well in everyday life because our lives are connected to emotional processing. When reading the assigned texted, emotional processing in older adults deals with the ability to only focus on the positive information which increases brain activity (Cavanaugh 57). In everyday life older people are surrounded by individuals in a younger generation. The people in the younger generation are constantly learning new information and sharing it with the older adults. As the older adults adapt to the new material the neurons in their brain begin to form new synapses (Stealing Time). The synapses are responsible for connecting the new information which then causes the coping mechanism. In order for the older adults to cope in life, they learn new trades which