Unit 3 - Chapter 6 of Text - Attention and Memory Flashcards

Question

6.3 - Are there deficits in some semantic memory processes?

Answer 1

There are no deficits in semantic memory processes such as language comprehension, the structure of knowledge, and the activation of general knowl- edge

Answer 2

- Semantic memory retrieval typically does not tax working memory, and thus older adults can draw upon experience in word meanings and/or general world knowledge.

Answer 3

- Semantic memories are part of our world knowledge - Although information in semantic memory is retained in older adults, it can be hard to access if it is not exercised on a regular basis

Answer 4

- Major area in which age-related decline in semantic memory can be observed is in its accessibility - This is illustrated in word-finding deficits - Older adults typically have more trouble retrieving a target word when presented with a definition of the word, and they tend to encounter more "tip-of- the-tongue" (TOT) experiences - TOT problems indicate that even highly familiar information can become more difficult to retrieve as we grow older.

Answer 5

- Researchers study episodic memory by having people learn information, such as a list of words, and then asking them to recall or recognize the items. - In a recall test, people are asked to remember information without hints or cues. Typical example would be a closed-book exam

Answer 6

- Recognition involves selecting previously learned informa- tion from among several items - Everyday examples of recognition include taking multiple-choice tests and picking out the names of your high school friends from a complete list of your classmates.

Answer 7

- Older adults perform worse than younger adults on tests of episodic memory recall in that they omit more information, include more intrusions, and repeat more previously recalled items - These age differences are large; for example, more than 80% of a sample of adults in their 20s will do better than adults in their 70s

Answer 8

- Older adults tend to be less efficient at spontaneously using internal study strategies, such as using imagery or putting items into categories in one's mind to organize information during study.

Answer 9

- Age differences between older and younger adults can be reduced in several ways 1) Allowing older adults to practice or to perform a similar task before learning a new list improves performance - better memory performance after practice parallels similar improvements following practice on tests of skills related to fluid intelligence 2) Using material that is more familiar to older adults also improves their performance. For example, older adults do not remember words such as byte or Walkman as well as words such as jitterbug or bobbysox 3) Older adults may use compensatory strategies to help themselves remember

Answer 10

- Older adults are apparently disadvantaged when left on their own to face relatively rapid-paced, disorganized information - Memory performance appears to be somewhat flexible and can be manipulated, with improvements coming from a variety of sources - Episodic memory process that is relatively spared with age: autobiographical memory.

Answer 11

- Information that needs to be kept for a very long time (from a few hours to many years) includes facts learned earlier, the meaning of words, past life experiences, etc. - Involves remembering information and events from our own life - such recollections provide us with a personal history and define who we are. - As important as autobiographical memory is, though, very few studies have looked at how well people remember things over the course of their lives. - Autobiographical memory is primarily a form of episodic memory, although it can also involve semantic memory - The episodic part of autobiographical memory is the conscious recollection of temporal and spatial events from one's past. - The semantic part consists of knowledge and facts of one's past (e.g., personal characteristics, knowledge that an event occurred) without having to remember exactly when things occurred and in what order. - The episodic details of autobiographical memory are more difficult for older adults, whereas the semantic aspects are much more easily remembered - Older adults have been shown to be worse than younger adults in reporting vivid recollections of their past - Older adults' general memories of real-life events have been shown to contain more personal thoughts and feelings and have been rated more interesting than those of younger adults

Answer 12

- Being able to verify what individuals remember accompanied by some record of true events is extremely important in evaluating our ability to remember over long periods of time. Only in cases where records have been kept for many years is this usually possible. - At age 50, participants completed a lengthy questionnaire about these their health in childhood, and their responses were compared with similar reports made 10 and 20 years earlier, as well as with the official records. Coleman and colleagues found amazing accuracy for information such as whether a person had ever been a smoker or had a particular disease such as chicken pox. - Half of the memories elicited at age 50 were more accurate than the memories for the same information elicited 10 years earlier at age 40

Answer 13

- Many people think that highly traumatic events are ones that are indelibly etched in our memories. - If so, then peo- ple who survived Nazi concentration camps should have vivid memories of their experiences. - Wagenaar and Groeneweg (1990) examined the testimony of 78 survivors of Camp Erika, a Nazi concentration camp in The Netherlands during World War II. Dutch police initially interviewed the survivors about their experiences between 1943 and 1948. In 1984, during a war crimes trial for an accused Nazi collaborator, these witnesses gave sworn depositions about their experiences at Camp Erika. The camp survivors' recollections were a mix of accurate and inaccurate information. In many cases memory was quite good; even 40 years later about half of the survivors remembered the exact date of their arrival at the camp and their entire identification number. They were able to recall the general conditions of the camp, overall treatment, and the like. However, they also had forgotten many important details, including in some cases their own brutal treatment. - Wagenaar and Groeneweg point out that these forgotten details mean that even extreme trauma is no guarantee that an event will be remembered. Perhaps forgetting the horrors of being brutalized is even a type of self-protection.

Answer 14

- No, some historical events that have considerable personal relevance, very unusual or novel events, and other events that are highly emotional are also remembered very well. - Such memories are called **flashbulb memories** because they are so vivid that it seems as if we have a photograph of the event - The September 11, 2001, terrorist attack is an example ... everyone can remember where they were and what they were doing - Flash bulb memories may also involve personal autobiographical events. Such events tend to impress into memory the circumstances in which the person first heard the news about the event; memories of the circumstances include information about the place, other people present at the time, what activities were occurring, the source of the information, and even associated smell - An interesting phenomenon arises when you examine vivid autobiographical events across indi- viduals' life spans. - It is important at what age the vivid event takes place - for both younger and older adults, vivid memories experienced earlier in life (between 10 and 30 years of age) are reported more often than those occurring during middle adulthood (between 30 and 50 years of age - For older adults, the bump in memory was most evident for happiest memories. In contrast, very sad memories showed a decline in recall. It may be that this earlier period of life has importance in defining oneself and thus helps to organize personal memo- ries, but that emotionally negative events are not included as importance is determined

Answer 15

- Results from years of research suggest an age-related decrement in encoding processes. An example of an encoding process that affects memory is elaborative rehearsal. - Elaborative rehearsal involves making connections between incoming information and information already known. For example, a person presented with the word emu and told that this is a bird that does not fly may try to think of other flightless birds. With some thought, ostrich may come to mind. Linking emu and ostrich would be an example of this type of rehearsal. - Research in support of an age-related decrement in elaborative rehearsal finds that older adults have more difficulty making such connections than younger adults do - Once these connections have been made, older and younger adults maintain them equivalently (which supports the conclusion that whereas encoding differences exist, storage differences do not). - Encoding processes involve **intentional learning of information**. However, what happens when information is learned and there are no expectations of testing this memory later on (e.g., when a person witnesses a crime)? This latter type of memory processing is sometimes called **incidental learning**. - For example, a study compared incidental and intentional learning of names in younger and older adults. Their instructions for encoding the names varied from stating the first letter of the name to defining the name to simply trying to remember the name for a later test. Younger adults tended to out- perform older adults for intentionally learned names, but older adults did as well as younger adults whenever they encoded the information incidentally (e.g., remembering the first letter or defining the name).

Answer 16

Why do these age differences in intentional versus incidental encoding occur? Anderson and col- leagues conclude that attentional resources are consumed to a greater extent during intentional encoding. - If you were asked to study material that you would be tested on, while at the same time you had to tune out a conversation going on in the same room, you would place a lot of effort into using strategies to effectively focus on the information to be studied. However, while you were studying the materials, if you were told that the conversation in the room was about you, you would probably extend more effort to listening to the conversation. You would perform better on the test in the first case than in the second case. Attentional control would be necessary while you encoded the information to succeed on the test. Distracting conversation would not hurt you when you were able to focus your attention more exclusively on the test.

Answer 17

- One important aspect of attentional control and expending attentional resources is that when we are confronted with large amounts of information that we need to remember, we tend to use various techniques, called **strategies** that make the task easier and increase the effi ciency of storage.

Answer 18

- Do older adults behave strategically when studying information to be remembered? - Two strategies for learning new information are 1) Organizing it 2) Establishing links to help you remember - Older adults do not spontaneously use such encoding strategies in comparison to younger adults - Older adults are less likely to take advantage of similarities in meaning among words (such as the link between river and lake) presented randomly in a list as a way to organize the items. Because the number of items remembered from such a list is highly related to the use of organization, younger adults outperform older adults on such tasks. - Spontaneous production of effective strategies is not a sufficient account of age differences in memory performance - Only 35% of older adults compared to 49% of younger adults used optimal strategies for encoding (e.g., placing related items into meaningful catego- ries) - There were large age differences in recall regardless of strategy methods used. Strategy production had a very modest effect on age differences in recall. - Large age differences in recall remained even when older adults were instructed to use effective strategies. However, producing a strategy does not necessarily imply that the strategy was used effectively.

Answer 19

- Age-related differences on explicit memory tasks are affected by the degree to which a task employs retrieval cues. - It has been long known that age differences are more pronounced on free-recall tests which provide no cues to individuals - For recognition tests, the original target to be learned is presented as a cue and fewer age differences are found - Older adults show more tip-of-the-tongue states and feeling-of-knowing (feeling you know something yet you are not sure what it is) after failure to retrieve information - This may be due to **temporary inaccessibility**. - Older adults are as likely as younger adults to recognize the material they cannot recall when in the TOT state.

Answer 20

- Age differences in memory where there are limited cues (e.g., free recall) may be a function of limited self-initiated operations in older adults. - When you are recognizing a previous piece of information, the fact that the target is in front of you creates a high level of environmental support. - A free-recall task demands that you access that information with limited help and cues from the environment. - Memory functioning in the aging adult is influenced by deficits in both encoding and retrieval -

Answer 21

- Cognitive neuroscience also presents evidence suggesting age differences in encoding and retrieval - Using PET scans, Grady found that both younger and older age groups showed similar patterns of increased blood flow in specific areas of the brain during recognition, but differed significantly during encoding. - Compared with older adults, younger adults showed significantly greater increases in blood flow to the left prefrontal and temporal areas of the brain. (Recall that this is called lateralization to a specific hemisphere or asymmetry.) - Grady interpreted these differences as evidence that age-related memory differences may be due to older adults' failure to encode information adequately. - Inadequate encoding could result in information not getting into memory at all, or not being as elaborately encoded, making retrieval more diffi cult at best. - fMRI studies have found that age-related reductions in frontal-lobe activation are associated with reduced ability in encoding words in memory - The hippocampal region has been related to current memory functioning as well as predicting the rate of further memory decline over time

Answer 22

- Prefrontal activity during memory performance is less lateralized (activity found more equally in both brain hemispheres instead of localized in one hemisphere) in older adults than in younger adults. - Lateralization (found in young adults) leads to more effective processing of information - Perhaps those older adults who show strong bilateralization (i.e., activity in both hemispheres) when processing information also show enhanced cognitive performance relative to older adults who show less bilateralization and less lateralization. - Additional activity across many brain regions that occurs when older adults process information may enhance performance on the specific task investigated.

Answer 23

1) It emphasizes that age-related decrements in memory are complex; they are not due to changes in a single process. 2) Intervention or training programs must consider both encoding and retrieval. Training people to use encoding strategies without also training them how to use retrieval strategies will not work. To the extent that only partial information is encoded, retrieval strategies need to focus on helping people find whatever aspects are available. 3) Theories of how memory changes with age must take individual differences into account, especially differential rates of change in component pro- cesses and lateralization.

Answer 24

- Memory situations involve both automatic and deliberate retrieval processes - **Process-dissociation paradigm** is used to sepa- rate out the different contributions of each of these two types of processes in a memory task. - **False-fame studies** - older and younger adults were asked to first read a list of nonfamous names. Then they were given a new list consisting of three types of names: names from the first list, additional new nonfamous names, and moderately famous names. Participants were asked to indicate which of the names presented were famous. They were also told that the names on the original list were nonfamous. If they were to recognize any names from that list, they should exclude them from further consideration. - The false-fame effect results when a previously observed nonfamous name (on the original list) is mistakenly identified as a famous name at testing. - Studying the original nonfamous names increases their familiarity, so when people see this name again and they do not consciously recollect that it was on the original list, they will produce the false-fame effect found that older adults produced a larger false-fame effect than young adults did. - In a subsequent study, adults were told that the names from the original list were actually obscure famous names, so if one looked familiar at testing, it would be appropriate to label it as famous whether or not they consciously recollected it. The first experiment assessed how con- scious recollection affects memory, and the second study assessed how familiarity affects memory. Overall, the assessment of conscious recollection was lower for older adults than for younger adults, but the assessment for automatic retrieval (in this case familiarity testing) in the second study did not differ across age groups. Thus, although conscious recollection is impaired as suggested earlier in this chapter; automatic retrieval of familiar information is spared. Jacoby and colleagues suggest that dif- ficulties in recollection on the part of older adults are largely a function of an inability during retrieval to access the details of an episode and may account for situations where older adults display memory problems. This idea relates back to our distinction between implicit and explicit memory as well as episodic and semantic memory. Both implicit and semantic memory tasks do not require such detailed conscious recollection of information; therefore, researchers have not seen poor performance on the part of older adults in these areas.

Answer 25

The fact that older adults exhibit the false-fame effect to a greater degree than younger adults suggests that although familiarity is intact, conscious recollection is not, thus allowing familiarity to misinform the older adult's performance.

Answer 26

**Source memory** - the ability to remember the source of a familiar event as well as the ability to determine if an event was imagined or actually experienced for an older adult to be able to discriminate whether she actually remembered to take her medication or only thought to do it. - The ability to discriminate between these two events necessitates that one is able to retrieve information about the context in which the event in question originally occurred. By reconstructing the original event accurately, the older adult will remember whether she actually took the medication or not. Research on age differences in source memory reveals that older adults are less accurate at a number of source-memory tasks

Answer 27

- False memory is when one remembers items or events that did not occur - Typically studied by presenting participants with a list of words that are all associated with a specific word that was not presented. So, for example, the experimenter presents the words nurse, hospital, patient, and surgery for the participant to study. At recall, she adds words such as doctor that did not appear on the original list, yet are semantically related to the list of words. - Older adults have more difficulty in correctly identifying information as false because they have trouble linking content information to its context - Older adults with lower frontal lobe functioning are particularly susceptible to false memories - Falsely identifying a familiar but innocent bystander in a criminal lineup. For example, in a typical study, older and younger adults are shown photographs of perpetrators and then a series of mug shots of innocent bystanders. A week later, in a lineup containing both the bystanders and perpetrators, older adults were worse at picking out the perpetrator. This deficit was related to older adults' difficulties in remembering the context in which they observed the photographs - False-fame effect, source-memory deficits, and false memories, could render older adults more susceptible to deception, as in con- sumer scams.

Answer 28

- Text is written with information at different levels of importance - What we read is composed of 3 elements: 1) Text has **central propositions** that are the main ideas of the text. They are the core facts that provide the story's framework 2) Text has **incidental propositions** (or ideas) that add colour to the story, but are not crucial facts 3) What we read is mixed with what we know about the world called **situation models**. If the story is about a robbery, for example, we don't have to have been involved in a robbery to understand what happened. Our basic knowledge of the world allows us to piece together the text's information to get a picture the incident. - The work on discourse (text) looks at memory at text-based levels - There are kinds of text that older adults remember well and there are kinds of text that older adults do not remember well

Answer 29

- Most of the work conducted in aging and discourse processing has examined memory at text-based levels. - Because texts are constructed with information at these different hierarchical levels of importance, a key question is whether there are age differences in memory for these different levels. - Are there age differences in memory between memory for main ideas and memory for details? - When text is clearly organized, with emphasis on structure and the main ideas, older adults are similar to younger adults in recalling more main ideas than less important details.

Answer 30

- Older adults are adversely affected by rapid presentation, highly unpredictable or unorganized material, and material that is dense in propositions - Older adults may be at a disadvantage when presented with text at speeds geared to younger adults. - When participants can pace themselves, age differences are eliminated - The more predictable and meaningful the text, the better the older adults perform - Finally, high verbal ability reduces age differences in overall recall during rapid presentation

Answer 31

- Older adults struggle when the text becomes propositionally dense (an increase in the number of propositions) and less familiar - Older adults have more difficulty than younger adults do in identifying or inhibiting less important details - An important aspect of text variables is that they may interact with personal characteristics of the reader to create differences in memory for discourse. - An example of this interaction involves situations in which people hold opinions or have knowledge about a topic and are then presented additional written information. - In terms of people's ability to remember this new information, does it matter whether the new information agrees or disagrees with what people already know?

Answer 32

- How is it that several people can read the same book and each has different recollections of the story? - Dfferences due to how individuals construct their situation model of the text. - Situation models of text include characters' emotional states, personalities, and relationships among people, objects, events - Reader influences the situation model, such as personal biases, the social context in which you are recalling a text, personal motivations for remembering certain bits of information while forgetting others.

Answer 33

- Yes ... Morrow and colleagues had older and younger adults memorize a map of a building in which there were several rooms with different objects in each of the rooms. They then read a narrative about a character who was moving from one room to another. - The situation model consisted of a spatial organization centered on the main character and her location. When they interrupted the participants' reading of the narratives and asked them whether certain objects were near or far from the main character's current location, both younger and older adults gave answers that were more accurate and faster when the object was close to the main character. However, older adults took longer to memorize the maps and were slower overall in their reading times. Morrow and col- leagues (1997) concluded that although older and younger adults use qualitatively similar strategies to update their situation models, the updating process is more effortful for older adults.

Answer 34

- Presented fables and nonfables to younger and older adults and examined their story recall styles. - Older adults used a more integrative or interpretive style for nonfable passages, whereas younger adults used a more literal or text-based style. - Age differences were not found for the fable passages. - These findings mean that younger adults may spontaneously shift their recall style depending on the type of passage, whereas older adults may use a more consistently integrative style regardless of passage type. - Another variable that affects performance is amount of prior knowledge or expertise - Compared time allocated to texts related to cooking versus general information in younger and older adults who either had high or low knowledge about cooking. High-knowledge individuals, whether they were younger or older, showed greater recall for the cooking texts - benefits of knowledge were equal for both younger and older adults.

Answer 35

- Retelling information more typically occurs in a social context in everyday life. After we see a movie we retell its contents to our friends - Are some contexts are more optimal for remembering for older adults than are others? - Older adults' retelling of stories varies depending upon who the listener is.

Answer 36

- Why would it be important to research this phenomena? 1) Studying this phenomena may shed some light on the generalizability of findings based on laboratory tasks such as word-list recall 2) New or alternative variables that affect performance could be uncovered, for example, factors that enhance memory functioning in older adults could be identified 3) Research on everyday memory may force us to reconceptualize memory itself

Answer 37

- Remembering to perform a planned action in the future, such as remembering to take medication - Studying prospective memory is a good illustration of how performance on everyday memory tests stacks up to performance on traditional laboratory tests. - Prospective memory has been examined in a natural context such as remembering to take medication - Findings were unexpected - older adults with rheumatoid arthritis were better at remembering to take their medications than middle-aged patients - Despite strong evidence for age-related cognitive decline in the older adults on traditional psychometric measures, older adults had the cognitive ability to manage medications. - What about the middle-aged adults? It turned out that a busy lifestyle in middle age was the major determinant of who was at risk for forgetting to take medications. - Researchers found that time-based tasks showed more age differences as long as people used self-generated strategies to remember, as these tend to decline with age; the cues in event-based tasks helped reduce age differences

Answer 38

- Older adults compensate for complexity in remembering by using and generating external cues like notes to themselves - Age differences in prospective memory is a complex issue and depends on the type of task, the cues used, and what is being measured.

Answer 39

_Viewing memory as a mental muscle_ - By applying this approach, older adults should benefit from repetitive practice, which involves using specific memory exercises - Exercising memory on one type of task strengthens it, setting the stage for better memory in a variety of other tasks - Physical and mental activity may serve as a protective factor against memory decline in later life. - Reduction in activity has been correlated with decline in cognitive performance - Fitness training also has increased cognitive performance in older adults regardless of the train- ing method or the older adults' personal character- istics

Answer 40

_Multilingualism and Cognitive Functioning_ - Does the number of languages a person speaks positively influence the cognitive state of older adults? - Older adults from 75 to 95 years of age who spoke four languages or more showed the best cognitive state - Multilingualism might be a protective factor for maintaining cognitive state as we age. - It does not matter whether the individuals have high or low education--speaking many languages had the same protective effect

Answer 41

- Given that semantic memory is relatively unimpaired as we grow older, it may have an enhancement effect on episodic memory for older adults - Ability to group to-be-remembered episodic information into previously learned semantic cat- egories reduces age differences on such memory tasks. - Studies have shown that older adults perform better when they can use previously learned semantic information to support episodic knowledge - For example, older adults are better at memory for related as opposed to unrelated word pairs

Answer 42

- Certain factors can negatively influence memory performance in older adults - Elimination of such factors could enhance memory functioning in older adults. - Primary example under investigation is negative stereotypes of aging - Older adults may not perform at optimal levels because they are aware of and threatened by the typical belief that aging hampers memory ability

Answer 43

_Metamomory_ - What we believe to be true about how our memories work - this type of self-evaluation is referred to as metamemory - We know that recall is typically harder than recognition, that memory strategies are often helpful, and that working memory is not limitless. - We may also believe that memory declines with age, that appointments are easier to remember than names, and that anxiety impairs performance. - Metamemory is most often assessed with questionnaires that ask about these various facts and beliefs. _Memory Monitoring_ - The awareness of what we are doing with our memory right now - We can be aware of the process of remembering in many ways - At times we know how we are studying, how we are searching for some particular fact, or how we are keeping track of time for an appointment. - At other times we ask ourselves questions while doing a memory task. For example, when faced with having to remember an important appointment later in the day, we may consciously ask ourselves whether the steps we have taken (e.g., writing a note) are sufficient.

Answer 44

- Researchers have explored age differences in metamemory by using questionnaires such as the _Metamemory in Adulthood Questionnaire and the __Cognitive Failures Questionnaire_ - These tap several different areas of knowledge about memory, including knowledge about strategies, tasks, change with age, and capacity. - Other questionnaires, such as the _Memory Self-Effi cacy Questionnaire_ and the _Memory Controllability Inventory_ assess specific aspects of memory beliefs. - The pattern of age differences in metamemory is interesting - older adults seem to know less than younger adults about the internal workings of memory and its capacity, view memory as less stable, expect that memory will deteriorate with age, and perceive that they have less control over memory

Answer 45

- The belief in inevitable decline with age is potentially damaging. - The belief that memory inevitably declines may negatively influence the performance of older adults, as indicated in the studies of negative stereotypes, and may also discourage people from strategy training because they may think that it is useless and that there is little point in exerting effort to try and remember something that does not come to mind immediately - Belief in inevitable decline does not apply equally to all aspects of memory. Older adults view memory for names as declining more rapidly than memory for things that happened long ago. Similarly, adults report that different kinds of information pose different likelihoods of being troublesome. - Remembering names is universally problematic, but especially for older adults - in contrast, remembering to pay bills, meet appointments, and take medications appears to remain unchanged with age

Answer 46

- Belief in one's ability to accomplish things is a pervasive theme in literature, religion, psychotherapy, and many other diverse arenas - Belief in oneself is referred to as memory self-effi cacy; it is the belief that one will be able to perform a specific task. - This is an important construct in understanding how memory changes with age - Memory self-efficacy is an important type of memory belief that is distinct from general knowledge about memory because - One may know a great deal about how memory works but still believe that one's ability to perform in a specific situation is poor.

Answer 47

- Memory self-efficacy is a key to understanding a broader array of phenomena, such as mastering the environment - Some older adults hold the assumption that memory inevitably declines with age and have experienced some age-related decreases in performance themselves. - As people experience tasks or situations across adulthood that they complete successfully, their memory self-efficacy should remain strong; those who experience failure should show decrements in memory self-effi cacy. These experiences should influence subsequent behavior; people who experience success may be more likely to seek out more challenging cognitive environments, whereas people experiencing failure may seek less cognitively demanding environments - Studies show that older adults with lower memory self-efficacy perform worse on memory tasks - Older adults with low memory self-efficacy compensate for poor memory performance by using people for assistance and using compensatory strategies to aid in their memory performance

Answer 48

- Memory Monitoring Memory involves knowing what you are doing mentally right now. - The most popular way researchers study memory monitoring is by having people predict how well they will do on a memory task. One variation of this technique requires that people predict how well they will do before they get a chance to see the task. - For example, participants are asked to predict how many words they think they can remember from a 20-item list before they see the list. - The second variation requires people to make performance predictions after they have seen the task. This time, they see the list first, and are then asked to predict how many words they will remember.

Answer 49

_Predictions without Experience_ - Estimating our performance without having a chance to see what we are up against is hard. - For example, guessing how well we will do on the first exam in a course is tough if we do not know anything about the exam style of the instructor. How well we think we will do depends on lots of test-related variables: item difficulty, fact versus concept questions, etc. - When older adults are put in the position of having to estimate performance without seeing the task, past research suggests that they tend to over- estimate how well they will do

Answer 50

_Predictions after Experience_ - A much different picture of age differences emerges when participants have a chance to see the task before making a performance prediction - One way this is done is by asking people to rate their confidence that they will be able to remember each item on a list of words that will be learned. - Results indicate that older adults are just as accurate in predicting their recall and recognition performances as younger adults - Regardless of age, adults overestimate performance on recall tasks but underestimate performance on recognition tasks.

Answer 51

_Comparing Prediction Types_ - Older adults are at a disadvantage when asked to predict performance if they are given no information about the task. But when this information is forthcoming--either from direct experience, from instructions pertaining to important things to think about, or from a request for predictions on familiar everyday tasks--older adults do as well as younger adults. - What happens if people are given multiple trials with a task and are asked to predict performance on each trial? - Older and younger adults adjust their predictions across trials on a list-learning task. On the first trial, performance predictions tend to be inaccurate, and predictions are influenced by scores on memory questionnaires. On subsequent trials, though, pre- dictions are more heavily influenced by actual per- formance on the preceding trial.

Answer 52

- Training people how to remember information more effectively can be aimed not only at people with identifiable disorders, but also at people whose memory performance has declined as a result of normal, age-related changes - To remember things we must pay attention to the incoming information, rely on already stored information to facilitate making new connections with the new material, and using the best process of encoding to provide future retrieval cues. - The best memory strategies practically guarantee that the appropriate cue will be available to access the stored information when it must be retrieved - Memory aids or strategies can be organized into meaningful groups. Among the most useful of these classifications is the E-I- E-I-O framework. - The E-I-E-I-O framework combines explicit memory and implicit memory, with two types of memory aids, external and internal aids. - Explicit memory involves the conscious and intentional recollection of information; remembering this definition on an exam is one example. - Implicit memory involves effortless and unconscious recollection of information; knowing that stop signs are red octagons is usually not something that people need to exert effort to remember when they see one on the road. - External aids are memory aids that rely on envi- ronmental resources, such as notebooks or calen- dars. - Internal aids are memory aids that rely on mental processes, such as imagery.

Answer 53

- The Aha! or O! experience in the framework is the one that comes with suddenly remembering something . As you can see in Table 6.1, the E-I-E-I-O framework helps organize how different types of memory can be combined with different types of memory aids to provide a broad range of intervention options to help people remember. We can use Camp and colleagues' approach to examine research on external and internal memory aids. In addition, we will briefly review two alterna- tives, memory exercises and medications.

Answer 54

- Diaries, address books, calendars, notepads, microcomputers, and other devices commonly used to support memory - Some external aids involve actually using some external device to store information (e.g., computers and date books), whereas others involve the use of external aids to cue action (e.g., setting a book out so you won't forget it). - Explicit-external interventions are the most frequently used, probably because they are easy to use and widely available - Explicit-external interventions have potential value for improving older adults' cognitive performance in real-world settings

Answer 55

- Best solved with an explicit-external intervention: a pillbox that is divided into compartments cor- responding to days of the week and different times of the day. - Nursing homes also use explicit-external interven- tions, such as bulletin boards with the date and weather conditions, to help residents keep in touch with current events.

Answer 56

1) Be given close to the time that action is required 2) Be active rather than passive 3) Be specific to the particular action 4) Be portable 5) Fit a wide range of situations 6) Store many cues for long periods 7) Be easy to use 8) Not require a pen or pencil

Answer 57

- Memory is much like a muscle, which needs to be exercised in order to stay in shape - External-implicit combinations, more widely used with children, nevertheless have applicability with older adults in some situations - Nursing homes use different color schemes to designate different wings or sections of the build- ing. Because people process the color-coded aspects of the building automatically, the implicit nature of this external cue makes it ideal for people who may otherwise have difficulty learning and remembering new information.

Answer 58

- People use rote rehearsal in preparing for an examination, suchs as HOMES, or use mental imagery in remembering the location of their car in a parking lot - Most memory training concerns improving people's use of these and other internal strategies that supply meaning and help organize incoming information - _Method of Loci_ (remembering items by mentally placing them in locations in a familiar environ- ment), mental retracing (thinking about all the places you may have left your keys), turning letters into numbers, and forming acronyms out of initial letters (such as NASA from National Aeronautic and Space Administration). - People who scored high on _openness to experience_ (a dimension of personality) performed better with imagery than other people - The _fantasy subfactor of the openness dimension_ (i.e., the tendency to engage in internal fantasizing) was related to greater improvement as a result of imagery training. It may be that people who find it easy to fantasize may be better at coming up with the imagery that help them remember people's names.

Answer 59

- Explicit strategies require effortful processing and are more taxing on the elderly and would likely boost memory performance for those elderly who are least likely to suffer failures or for young adults - Healthy older adults are less willing to use effortful internal strategies

Answer 60

- Implicit-internal memory aid -

Answer 61

- Research has focused on the underlying neurological mechanisms in memory, but we still are not sure which neurotransmitters are primarily involved with memory. - Attempts at enhancing memory through the use of drugs that affect neurotransmitters (e.g., acetylcholine) have been made, but so far have produced only modest, short-term improvements

Answer 62

- Which memory strategy is best clearly depends on the situation - Remembering names probably demands an internal strategy Remembering appointments can most easily be helped by external strategies - Best approach is to tailor specific strategies to specific situations - To remember names, older adults were taught an internal strategy emphasizing the need to associate new names with already known information - In contrast, use of external aids with information on how to review them was used for remembering

Answer 63

- One way to distinguish normal and abnormal changes is to ask whether the changes disrupt a person's ability to perform daily living tasks. - Normative changes usually do not interfere with a person's ability to function in everyday life - When problems appear, however, it would be appropriate to find out what is the matter.

Answer 64

- Researchers can test for specific problems in visual and verbal memory through neuroimaging by examining glucose metabolism with PET scans and fMRIs - Brain-imaging techniques also allow researchers to find tumors, strokes, and other types of damage or disease that could account for poorer-than-expected memory performance. - Certain changes in brain wave patterns in the medial-temporal lobe of the brain are indicative of decrements during encoding and retrieval of verbal information

Answer 65

- Diseases such as the dementias, are marked by massive changes in memory - Alzheimer's involves the progressive destruction of memory beginning with recent memory and eventually self-identity - Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome involves major loss of recent memory and sometimes a total inability to form new memories after a certain point in time

Answer 66

1) Depression 2) Dementias 3) Amnesia following a head injuury or brain disease - Depression is characterized by feelings of helplessness and hopelessness - Dementia, such as Alzheimer's disease, involves substantial declines in cognitive performance that may be irreversible and untreatable - Much of the research on clinical memory testing is on differentiating the changes in memory due to depression from those involved in Alzheimer's disease.

Answer 67

- Serious depression impairs memory - severely depressed people show: 1) A decreased ability to learn and recall new information 2) A tendency to leave out important information 3) A decreased ability to organize 4) Less effective memory strategies 5) Increased sensitivity to sad memories 6) Decreased psychomotor speed - When age-related differences in the effects of depression - 2 studies have found that the negative effects of depression on memory are greater in young and middle-aged adults than in older adults - The effect of depression on memory may decrease gradually as we grow older, and even more so in very old age - It may be that once normative age differences in episodic memory are eliminated statistically, few differences between depressed and nondepressed elderly remain. Thus, at this point the memory impairments that accompany severe depression appear to be equivalent across adulthood.

Answer 68

- Alzheimer's is characterized by severe and pervasive memory impairment that is progressive and irreversible - Memory decrements in Alzheimer's involve the entire memory system, from sensory to long-term to remote memory. - Early changes in Alzheimer's are similar to depression.

Answer 69

- We know very little about how particular nutrient deficiencies relate to specific aspects of memory. - In a recent study of widely marketed and purported memory enhancers, more solid findings were limited to stud- ies with animals. For example, phosphatidylserine (PS) attenuated neuronal deterioration effects of aging and restored normal memory on a variety of tasks in rodents - Findings with humans are limited. In fact, studies have failed to show this relationship for older adults with probable Alzheimer's - For older adults with moderate cognitive impairment, PS did show modest increases in memory - Drugs have been associated with memory problems. - The most widely known of these are alcohol and caffeine, which if abused over a long period are associated with severe memory loss - Less well known are the effects of prescription and over-the-counter medications - Sedatives and tranquilizers have been found to impair memory performance