developmental psych

Question 1

what is Alzheimers

Answer 1

a physical disease that effects the brain and leads to dementia. it is a progressive disease. more symptoms develop and they also get worse.

the disorder differs from normal age processes as it is selective in how it affects cognition. the early symptoms affect the ability to retain new information while keeping old memory intact.

Alzheimers also impairs the episodic memory. as the disease progresses the impairment increases and thus affects LTM too. this is due to the loss of brain matter, in particular the hippocampus and temporal cortex.

Question 2

symptoms of Alzheimers

Answer 2

memory relapses such as misplace items, forget about recent conversations

Question 3

what did Badly find 2001

Answer 3

• when participants were asked to identify a letter Z among other distractor letters, patients with Alzheimers performed worse on the difficult distraction task. and when given a dual task procedure, were even more impaired.
• this indicates that dual attention tasks are specifically impaired by the disease. (impairment in CE)

Question 4

what is developmental psychology

Answer 4

it investigates what happens to us as we age.

Question 5

Loftus study

Answer 5

A study by Loftus et al. (1992) demonstrates this by showing museum visitors a film then questioning them later. Loftus found that average accuracy was 74%. 26-35 year-olds were most accurate (77%) and the elderly (age 65+) group were the least accurate (56%).

Not only did children (age 5-10) and the elderly (age 65+) get the lowest scores for accuracy, they were also the most suggestible - when there was a “leading question” they were more likely to produce a false memory.