week 3 Flashcards
(42 cards)
Explain the correlation between top-down control and compensation success (low, medium and high top-down control)
Low top-down control requires little compensation meaning there no need for a lot of activation
medium top down control: the task requires more compensation but not too much meaning that activation occurs
high top down: task requires too much activation and older people cannot do this leading to lower compensation achieved
Related utilization of neural circuits hypothesis (crunch model)
Level of task difficulty impacts performance and brain activation
Increased in brain activation until demands exceed the ability to compensate (crunch point) and then we see a decline
What is the effect of external factors such as brain injury?
brain injury can worsen some cognitive diseases like dementia
What are the two aspects of attention?
excitation and inhibition
explain excitation
automatic function whereby any familiar object, scene, word, leads to automatic mental representation
explain inhibition
since we cannot process all information in the environment at one time, humans pay attention to some stimuli and tune out others
3 inhibitory mechanisms that help with the selection
access, deletion and restraint
Explain access
Access: limiting access to the irrelevant info
Explain deletion
Deleting Infor that is not relevant
explain restraint
restraining function control competing responses
Evidence for the access function comes from two areas of study. Which are?
Semantic priming literature and distractability literature
What is semantic priming literature
broader semantic activation in older than younger adults
what is distractability literature
Older adults show great distractibility because they allow more info to become active in their mental representation (leaky filter)
What does it mean that older people have broader semantic activation than older people?
Imagine a web of connected objects. For instance fire is tied to orange, hot, smoke, firefighters etc. Since older people have more life experience they also have more semantic connections than younger people
Explain the study that identified older people have more semantic connections
condition one: multiple pairs of words were shown that have obvious connections (cat vs. dog)
contion two: pairs of words were shown that have no connection
Results indicated that older people responded more quickly and accurately to connected word pairs
Distractability: older adults show decline in performance in tasks with
additional visual distractors
Example of distractability study
computerized digit substitution: the one in class where numbers represented a symbol.
What were the results of this study?
Older people were far better at the computerized digit substitution, focusing on one item at a time. In the distraction condition, they performed far worse
Explain the N-back test
Is the current picture the same as the last picture
Each picture is superimposed with an irrelevant word
After delay, participants are tested for their knowledge of the irrelevant words
What did the N back test reveal in older people?
Older adults have better knowledge of irrelevant words than younger adults because they attend to the irrelevant information.
What was found with deletion performance in older vs younger people?
older adults have more difficulty than younger adults ignoring/deleting the no longer relevant information
Reading comprehension in older adults. What happened when new information was introduced correcting old info in a story?
Older adults were more likely to keep the original interpretation
What is a span task?
remembering different sets of words
What is the standard span task?
Few words starting and every set increases in size requiring participant to try and remember more and more
