PSY 3128 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Conscientiousness, Prospective Memory, Sub-Saharan Africa
Document Summary
What is different between young and older people: memory- not remembering when or where they told you a story before, acquiring new skills- learning how to use the new smart phone. Does everything just get worse with age: verbal knowledge got better with age, whereas working memory, short term and long term memory decrease significantly. Problem: speed-accuracy trade off, memory test (after studying 20 items, who did best, many paradigms require us to take both accuracy and reaction time into account to interpret performance. Problem: reaction time always slower in older adults, could be for non-cognitive reasons (weak finger muscles, dry mouth) Solution 2: devise tasks that focus on accuracy rather than reaction time. Different kinds of attention: sustained/ vigilance, few age effects, selective, searching for and selecting relevant information ignoring irrelevant information, while somehow still monitoring environment for potentially important information.
