Mind Wandering In Older Adults: An Experimental Study

• Reading now means skipping and skimming; five minutes on the same Web page is considered an eternity. This is not reading as Marilynne Robinson described it: the encounter with a second self in the silence of mental solitude. (The end of solitude, pg. 4)

The research aims at determining the affect of dementia on the lives of individuals and how it impacts on their social interactions. The research will also identify the ways in which aging individuals can refrain themselves from falling prey to this disease. It will highlight some important information for caregivers who will better understand this disease and will know how to deal with people who have this disease. As we all

Aging is a natural process of life however, studies show that there are some age-related decline in cognitive development. As a person grows older some brain cell dies, shrink, or weaken and cause some decline in brain functions. Some cognitive processes include attention, working memory, long-term memory, perception, and executive control. The material will explain the effect of aging on cognitive development by providing scholarly research proof.

According to Marlynn Wei from Psychology Today, “mindfulness helps to get ‘unstuck’ [from negative thoughts]”. In her article “Mindfulness Quiets Unhelpful Thoughts”, she mentions how it “encourages a lack of attachment to thoughts that wander through [the] mind.”

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

Our daily task requires us to pay full attention towards them, with a full sense of concious. During those daily tasks our attention is divided among our surroundings. It gives us the ability to multitask, as we can foucus on multiple subjects at the same time. However, this ability declines as we age. Older adults have a difficcult time processing information in the visual periphery. Mnay researches have been done to compare young adult and older adults functional field of View (FFOV). Though the expectation for the results of the research was not met, by measuring the retinal area from which observers can collect information necessary to make specific judgements, we can determine the differnce between young adults and old adults attention span. The experiement applied the redundant target effect to compare it with single-target conditions. Through the experiemnets psychologists were only able to discover that genral cognition in older adults was

Intellect also changes as individual’s age. You have to realize that every individual has different levels and areas of cognitive skill because of factors like culture, as Gardner studied, and gender, as discovered by Schaie in the 1957 Seattle Longitudinal Study (Berger, 2014, p. 447-448). Your experience of intellectual change may also be different from your peers. Although you will continue to grow intellectually, you will not be able to expand your intellect as much as when you were younger (Berger, 2014, p. 446). Also, as you age, you may find yourself focusing on one task at a time, as your brain has a harder time being attentive to, processing, and juggling several tasks at once (Berger, 2014, p. 453). Furthermore, as was found by the

The purpose of this study was to determine how the difference in age can affect the susceptibility to proactive interference; the interference of past material inhibiting one’s full potential to learn new material, by using the Stroop effect. This study was designed to

Substantial research has been done on the positive effects of long-term meditation practices on the promotion of cognitive functions. However, the effects of brief meditation practices have not been as thoroughly researched. Accordingly, this study will further investigate the effects of short-term mindfulness-based training (MT) on the multiple traits of attentional processing. I hypothesize that brief MT can have similar results to that of long-term practices, indicating that meta-cognition can be improved in a short period of time. This experimental study will compare a MT group, a relaxation group, and a control group—all made up of inexperienced participants—on their performance of higher-order processing of attentional tasks. We predict that the MT group will do better than the other groups on all tests administered, and that they will improve significantly compared to their previous performance.

The current study’s purpose was to validate measures of attention to use it in longitudinal studies with older populations. The Test of Everyday Attention (TEA) is a method used to measure performance with individuals who had some sort of an attention deficit. There are three systems to what makes up attention: (1) selecting relative stimuli and to ignore the irrelevant ones; (2) maintaining preparedness in the absence of external signs and (3) to focus and to take away attention. The TEA is based largely on everyday living, which helps identifying a person’s attentional problems in a real life situation. This test is typically used on individuals in the age range of 18 to 80 years because having participants older than that age group are the

Older adults are less likely to see the gorilla because aging increases inattentional blindness or the ability to notice unexpected events.

Attention is known as a behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating awareness on a specific object, issue, or activity, while not focusing on other potential stimuli from the environment. While the human brain has great capabilities for processing information, it also has limited capacity. A person cannot attend to all the information being received through all the five senses at one time. And this capacity is reduced as people get older. Older people tend to have decreased brain activity in the the brain areas that

Some day five years ago, I was sitting in your common inspirational filled, colored poster decorated sixth grade math class at Nativity of Mary Private School. We were learning about multiplying and dividing fractions when I look across the room to spot Alex Lopez chewing on his fingernails and zoning out. As I saw this behavior I began to notice that Alex did this in almost every class, and then he would snap back into reality like there was no change in his state of mind. His daydreaming rituals would occur everyday, starting with nail biting and ending with a reality check. I became a wallflower and started watching everyone’s behaviors, I soon realized that praised Alex Lopez, was not the only one committing this act.

Studies on vigilance and sustained attention have been a widely studied part of psychology since the Second World War. This is because it was found that people monitoring radars for enemy ships experienced what is now known as vigilance decrement. That is when the ability of a subject to detect an abnormality during a task which primarily displays a “normal” screen. In the case of WWII radar monitors, this was to detect when an enemy submarine entered the radar. (Helton, W. S. & Russell, P. N. (2012). ) After a short time, typically 20-30 minutes but in certain cases as little as 5 minutes, vigilance decrement can occur. (Caggio, D. M., & Parasuraman, R. (2004)). There are two main theories commonly cited to explain this phenomenon, mindless theory and resource theory. Resource theory says that the vigilance decrement is due to the exhaustion of brain resources required to maintain focus on the task. Mindless theory simply explains vigilance depletion as being caused by disengagement from the task due to boredom. (Helton, W. S. & Russell, P. N. (2012).) The two theories explain the same phenomenon much differently; resource theory says it’s caused in part by cognitive overload, while mindless theory suggests it’s caused by cognitive under-load causing boredom. (Helton, W. S., & Russell, P. N. (2015)). Resource theory is strongly supported by a wide array of evidence from behavioural studies, mental workload studies, and brain imaging studies. When the

To identify and rule-out the possible causes for Mdm Soh’s reading difficulties and irritability, it is necessary to differentiate between normal changes with ageing and illness. As the human body ages, it is normal for certain cognitive functions to decline. In an older person of Madam Soh’s age, an individual of 65 years old may read at a reduced speed due to a slower reaction or response time as compared to a younger person. However, the process of reading in itself remains relatively stable into old age. The main reason for this is because the skill of knowing how to read is associated with the procedural memory which declines the least and is generally not affected with normal physiological aging. For this reason, Mdm Soh’s reading difficulty may instead be a sign of illness and should be explored further. Another possible reason associated with normal changes with ageing that could be linked to Mdm Soh’s reading difficulties is visual problems. Presbyopia is a normal part of aging that occurs because the eye has difficulty focusing light on to the retina as a result of stiffening of the lens and reduced flexibility of the muscle fibres around the lens. This can