PSYC 3610 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Prospective Memory, Episodic Memory, Metamemory
20 Jun 2018
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CHAPTER 12 MEMORY IN OLDER ADULTS
Introduction
• For most of us, preserved memory function is seen as vital to maintaining
health and competence as we get older.
• The prospect of having diminished memory abilities can cause concern in
older adult.
o They may worry that each memory failure is an omen of further
decline to come.
• Certainly, in our culture, we have a stereotype of older adults as being more
forgetful ad having memory deficits relative to younger adults.
• Most older adults have healthy memories.
• Memory declines
o Working memory
o Encoding into and retrieval from episodic memory
o Source monitoring
o Prospective memory
o Fluid intelligence
• Memory stays constant
o Implicit memory
o Metamemory
• Memory improves
o Semantic memory
▪ Crystallized intelligence
o Lexical knowledge
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Theories of Aging and Memory
Processing Speed Theory
• Processing speed: age-related declines are caused because older people’s
cognitive processing does not work as fast as that of younger adults
o Take longer to learn new things and to retrieve information
o Result in relatively weaker memory performance
o Leads to deficits in those memory specific domains that require
encoding of new information and rapid retrieval of existing information
• This view does not predict deficits in memory performance that is untimed and
does not require recall.
o E.g., Self-paced recognition tests should not show any deficits.
o In fact, in many cognitive tasks, older adults can perform just as
accurately as younger adults, but each response takes them a bit
more time.
• This view likens memory to a physical skill.
o As on grows older, one loses quickness, and it takes linger to build
muscle.
• In tasks in which participants must make speeded decisions, such as lexical
decision tasks, older adults will perform more slowly than younger adults.
o When reaction times were examined, there was a consistent
advantage for younger adults over older adults.
• Speed processing also predicted performance on a host of memory tasks
within each age group.
o Those older adults who were faster at the perceptual comparison
tasks also did better in working memory and episodic memory tasks.
• This theory is predictive across a range of situations.
o E.g., Memory for music (Dowling et al., 2018)
o Older adults have more difficulty recognizing melodies when they are
played at a fast tempo than when they are played at a slower tempo.
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o When the melody is played slowly, there are no differences in
recognition between younger and older adults.
Inhibition Theory
• Inhibition theory: the ability to block out irrelevant stimulation decreases with
age, so the memory declines seen in old age are a consequence of poor
attentional processes
• Older adults cannot direct their attention as well as younger adults among a
host of competing sources of information.
• Inhibition also means the suppress retrieval of irrelevant information.
o E.g., When older adults attempt to retrieve a name, such as the name
of a grandchild, they have difficulties in inhibiting other names.
o Thus, the grandparent may need extra time to sort through the
additional names that are accidentally retrieved, r they may
inadvertently use the wrong name.
• In directed forgetting studies, younger adults are better able to inhibit the to-
be-forgotten words.
o This leads to the ironic effect that older adults have better recall for the
to-be-forgotten items than do the younger adults.
• Darowski et al. (2008) asked younger and older participants to read short
texts, some of which contained irrelevant and distracting words embedded in
otherwise meaningful sentences.
o Older adults were more affected by the irrelevant stimuli than were
younger adults.
o Their reading times were slower than those of younger adults, and
they remembered less from the passages than did younger adults
• Colombel et al. (2016) first classified older adults by their inhibition ability
(good or poor) in order to see how such abilities affected both correct recall
and false memory.
o Then, they were given a DRM task.
o In the standard DRM task, participants were asked to recall the items
they saw on the list.
Document Summary
Most older adults have healthy memories: memory declines, working memory, encoding into and retrieval from episodic memory, source monitoring, prospective memory, fluid intelligence, memory stays constant, implicit memory, metamemory, memory improves, semantic memory, crystallized intelligence, lexical knowledge. 2: when the melody is played slowly, there are no differences in recognition between younger and older adults. It is the central executive system that seems to be most negatively affected by age. Goth , oberaur, and kliegl (2007: compared young and old in two tasks, one task: visual-motor task. Semantic memory: aging has little effect on semantic memory. Recall tests: when recall tests are used to evaluate episodic memory, older adults typically have deficits relative to younger adults. Memory accuracy in episodic memory: although the total amount of information in recall decreases in older adults, the accuracy of what older adults recall is not impaired relative to younger adults.
