Addis, D., Wong, A., & Schacter, D. (2008). Age-Related Changes in the Episodic Simulation of Future Events. Psychological Science, 19(1), 33-41.
This study tested whether or not the common deficit of the elderly’s ability to use episodic memory to recall past events extends to their ability to use episodic memory to predict future events. Both instances of recalling and predicting use a common neural pathway. The experimenters tested sixteen younger adults with a mean age of 25 and sixteen older adults with a mean age of 72. Each individual was given a noun and told to recall a memory or imagine an event relating to that noun. They were also told to tell the story from a particular perspective—vantage point or field perspective. After 3 minutes, the individuals had to stop and were rated on the detail, emotion, and personal significance of their account. Each individual went through 8 trials. The study found there was a correlation
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with the ability to remember past events and predict future events. Young adults tended to focus on internal details (details relating to the central event) while older adults tended to focus on external details (details surrounding the main event). Emotion generally correlated with detail. Overall, the findings were consistent with the hypothesis that episodic memory of both past and future events declines with age. Ikier, S., Yang, L., & Hasher, L. (2008). Implicit Proactive Interference, Age, and Automatic Versus Controlled Retrieval Strategies. Psychological Science, 19(5), 456-461. This study compared older and younger adults’ ability to recover from cognitive interference during automatic and controlled processing.
Twenty-seven younger adults with a mean age of 21 and twenty-seven older adults with a mean age of 65 were given a list of 45 words. Then the group was given a new list of 50 word fragments. Twenty of the fragments matched words in the first list, but also had similar structure to other words presented in the list. The rest of the fragments were completely new words. The elderly were quicker to complete the new-word fragments which may indicate older adults are less likely to use controlled retrieval than young adults. The interfering words of similar structure did inhibit the older any more than with the younger. Overall, the study showed if the younger adults came to a word they could not recall with automatic retrieval, they were more likely to use controlled retrieval than the older adults. This may indicate the lack of ability of the older brain to choose what information to and not to
suppress. Lee, T. C., Leung, A. S., Fox, P. T., Jia-Hong, G., & Chan, C. H. (2008). Age-related differences in neural activities during risk taking as revealed by functional MRI. Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience, 3(1), 7-15. doi:10.1093/scan/nsm033 This study researches the cognitive differences in older and younger adults partaking in risky activities. Twelve younger men with a mean age of 30 and nine older men with a mean age of 65 participated in a points-based game. The participants would have to press a buzzer to obtain 20, 40, or 80 points; however, the players were made aware choosing 40 or 80 points may actually cause a subtraction of the amount. Younger individuals were generally more likely to take riskier action during the game. Both age groups had different neural responses when confronted with a risky choice as shown by brain scans during the activity. The older individuals showed neural activity in their right insula which is associated with neuroticism and risk avoidance. This also may mean older individuals use more emotion when making risky decisions. Anguera, J., Boccanfuso, J., Rintoul, J., Hashimi, O. A., Faraji, F., Janowich, J., & ... Gazzaley, A. (2013). Video game training enhances cognitive control in older adults. Nature, (7465), 97-101. This study consisted of two experiments that tested the relationship of age and the ability to multitask. The first experiment tested 174 individuals across the entire span of adulthood—20 to 79 years old. The game required to the participants to drive a car or respond to a sign on the screen and eventually do both simultaneously. The game would customize to level that challenged the participant to a point of around 80% accuracy. As expected, the ability to multitask decreased with the progression of age. For the second portion of the study, the testers began to train the 46 older individuals in the study to see if they would be able to improve their multitasking ability. Sixteen trained in multitasking, fifteen trained in a single-task version of the game, and fifteen in a no-contact control version of the game. All trained an hour a day, three times a week for six months. Those trained in the multitasking version of the game improved while the other categories of individuals did not see a significant improvement. The brain wave activity of the older adults who trained in the multitasking version of the game also began to resemble the brain wave activity of the younger adults as collected from the first experiment. Da Hyun, K., Jong Dae, L., & Hee Joong, L. (2015). Relationships among hearing loss, cognition and balance ability in community-dwelling older adults. Journal Of Physical Therapy Science, 27(5), 1539-1542. This study tested to discover whether or not there is a relationship between the deterioration of cognition, hearing loss, and balance in the elderly. Forty-six individuals over 65 years old were tested in these three areas. Cognition was tested with a standard Korean test, while hearing loss was tested by an audiologist. Balance was determined with two tests: standing on one leg, timed getting up and walking. The hearing test was split into a hearing loss group and a no hearing loss group. As age decreased, all three of the areas decreased as was expected. The experimenters expected there to be a significant correlation with hearing loss and cognition; however, they found no correlation. Only balance and hearing showed a significant correlation. Hars, M., Herrmann, F. R., Gold, G., Rizzoli, R., & Trombetti, A. (2014). Effect of music-based multitask training on cognition and mood in older adults. Age & Ageing, 43(2), 196-200. The researchers of this study noticed cognitive function and mood directly related to elderly individuals’ gait and falling risk. Therefore, they researched the effects of multitasking with music to test whether or not it improved mood and/or cognitive function. For six months, 134 adults over 65 years old participated in various tasks involving the rhythms of music being played during their assigned activity. Fifty-four were not trained and tested as the control group. The “intervention” group—or non-control group—showed a reduction in anxiety and an increase in scores on their mini-mental state examination (MMSE) in comparison to the control group which did not show a change as drastic. This study proved how to develop an individual’s ability to block out irrelative stimuli while participating in a goal or task. Jones, K. T., Stephens, J. A., Alam, M., Bikson, M., & Berryhill, M. E. (2015). Longitudinal Neurostimulation in Older Adults Improves Working Memory. Plos ONE, 10(4), 1-18. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0121904 The goal of this study was to find a way to maintain or increase working memory despite its decline in old age. The experimenters trained the participants’ working memory with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in the hopes to not only see a direct improvement in the patients’ working memory but show improvement in untrained tasks. The participants—between 55 and 75 years old—would train 5 days a week for two weeks then come back a month later for a follow-up. A control group of participants did not have activated tDCS. The training tasks measured the uses of short-term memory, selective attention, working memory performance. All groups showed improvement over time, but those with an activated tDCS sustained their improvement to the follow-up trial. Those with an activated tDCS also showed better scores in new or added tasks during the study and training in comparison to those with an inactivated tDCS. These findings lead to further questioning of how long the benefits of tDCS and working memory training last.
Hippocampus is a small, curved region, which exists in both hemispheres of the brain and plays a vital role in emotions, learning and acquisition of new information. It also contributes majorly to long term memory, which is permanent information stored in the brain. Although long term memory is the last information that can be forgotten, its impairment has become very common nowadays. The dysfunction is exemplified by many neurological disorders such as amnesia. There are two types of amnesia, anterograde and retrograde. Anterograde amnesia is inability in forming new information, while retrograde refers to the loss of the past memory. As suggested by Cipolotti and Bird (2006), hippocampus’s lesions are responsible for both types of amnesia. According to multiple trace theory, the author suggests that hippocampal region plays a major role in effective retrieving of episodic memory (Cipolotti and Bird, 2006). For example, patients with hippocampal damage show extensively ungraded retrograde amnesia (Cipolotti and Bird, 2006). They have a difficult time in retrieving information from their non-personal episodic events and autobiographical memory. However, this theory conflicts with standard model of consolidation. The difference between these theories suggests that researchers need to do more work to solve this controversy. Besides retrieving information, hippocampus is also important in obtaining new semantic information, as well as familiarity and recollection (Cipolotti and Bird, 2006). For instance, hippocampal amnesic patient V.C shows in ability to acquire new semantic knowledge such as vocabularies and factual concepts (Cipolotti and Bird, 2006). He is also unable to recognize and recall even...
Hess, T. M., Popham, L. E., Emery, L., & Elliott, T. (2011). Mood, motivation, and misinformation: aging and affective state influences on memory. Aging Neuropsychology and Cognition, 13-34. doi:10.1080/13825585.2011.622740
Humans have an incredible capability for thinking and memory. We can remember events from our past, for our future, and of things that have no relative meaning to ourselves. These memories can be traced back to different systems of our brains through a process of encoding, storage, and retrieval. As part of the retrieval process, memories can be remembered with or without their sources. As research has found, our memories are not labeled or tagged with their origin (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay 1993). Because of this, our memory has developed a process called source monitoring. This is how we link our memories to the source that they developed from, usually using specific characteristics and general knowledge of the memory. For example, source monitoring includes identifying who told you something, whether or not you saw an event in real life, the time of the event and whether you told something to your friend or only thought about telling it. The source-monitoring framework for the process involved in pinpointing the origin of information by Johnson and colleagues, explains both vertical and distorted memory with a common set of principles. First, a specific memory consists of specific characteristics including spatial, temporal, and perceptual details. Secondly, the memories can differ in characteristics that can be used to find the origin. More extensive source monitoring can involve beliefs about memory and cognition as well as retrieving more information from memory and finding the source of the memory given these beliefs, other specific characteristics or general knowledge (Johnson et al. 1993). Sometimes these beliefs aren't always accurate. Because some people may be influenced by their personal ideologies during retriev...
Human memory is flexible and prone to suggestion. “Human memory, while remarkable in many ways, does not operate like a video camera” (Walker, 2013). In fact, human memory is quite the opposite of a video camera; it can be greatly influenced and even often distorted by interactions with its surroundings (Walker, 2013). Memory is separated into three different phases. The first phase is acquisition, which is when information is first entered into memory or the perception of an event (Samaha, 2011). The next phase is retention. Retention is the process of storing information during the period of time between the event and the recollection of a piece of information from that event (Samaha, 2011). The last stage is retrieval. Retrieval is recalling stored information about an event with the purpose of making an identification of a person in that event (Samaha, 2011).
The process of memorization starts at birth with the development of cells and extends throughout the lifetime through the effects of life experiences and stimulants. Like the rest of the body, the brain is made up of cells. These brain cells are different, more specialized cells. (Sprenger 1). Two major brain cells are the neurons- the nerve cells- and the glial cells which work as the ‘glue’ of the neurons. At birth, the brain contains approximately 100 billion neurons. Although that number remains constant over time, these cells can lose their function if not exercised properly in a process called “neutral pruning”. Learning is defined as “two neurons communicating with each other”. A neuron has learned when it has made a connection with another neuron (Sprenger 2).
Making and storing memories is a complex process involving many regions of the brain. (3). Most experts agree that we have two stages of memories - short-term memory and long-term memory. Short-term memory is the immediate memory we have when we first hear or perceive someth...
Research studies established by Herlitz, Nilsson, and Backman prove that sex differences favor women when it comes to episodic memory. In this research experiment these psychologists took about 1,000 applicants, both male and female, between ages of 35 – 80, and asked them to remember a list of words; the study showed that women outperformed men by 25 percent. Coming to the conclusion that, since women were able to recall more words than men they evidently had the better episodic memory. Furthermore this article expands upon this subcategory of memory by describing the two types of tasks involved with it: verbal-production ta... ...
Memory is the tool we use to learn and think. We all use memory in our everyday lives. Memory is the mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experiences. We all reassure ourselves that our memories are accurate and precise. Many people believe that they would be able to remember anything from the event and the different features of the situation. Yet, people don’t realize the fact that the more you think about a situation the more likely the story will change. Our memories are not a camcorder or a camera. Our memory tends to be very selective and reconstructive.
It has been a time-consuming belief that women have better multi-tasking skills than men. Multi-tasking involves doing several tasks at once. Multi-tasking uses short-term memory. If women are better at multi-tasking than men, it would seem that they would have better short term memory as well. “In general, the gender-related differences include a wide range of processing skills. It has been shown that females recall the appearance of others better than males and score higher on tasks involving manipulation of phonological and semantic information, episodic and semantic memory, verbal learning, verbal analytical working memory, object location memory, fine motor skills and perceptual speed, while males tend to score higher on tasks involving visuospatial working memory fluid reasoning, and positional reconstruction, or when spatiotemporal analyses are required (González, 2013).” Memory is one the most important cognitive domains in order to have an everyday function. Memory processes storing, encoding, and retrieving information. Short-term memory is the function that temporarily retains stimuli that just have been perceived and is involved in the frontal and temporal cortices.
Knapton, S 2014, ‘Brains of elderly slow because they know so much’ Telegraph Media Group, published in the Journal of Topics in Cognitive Science, viewed on the 22nd of march 2014
Additionally, an older work had been done to examine and exemplify that the amount of activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex during long-term memory encoding can to a certain degree predict the possibility that the material encoded will be successfully recalled. In contrast to this, a study on long-term memory retrieval has highlighted the reliability of this presence and found evidence of this in the anterior, frontopolar prefrontal cortex. (Breweret al.,1998
The recognition accuracy for old events was calculated as the proportion of performed and imagined events that were correctly recognized as old, regardless of whether they were correctly attributed to having been performed or imagined. (Kelley, 2009). Even with a 1-week delay, the percentage of performed actions or imagined performing in phase 1 that were correctly remembered as old was relatively high 91.1%, and overall false alarm rates were relatively low at 4.7%. (Kelley, 2009). However people remembered that an event happened does not mean they correctly remembered how it happened. (Kelley, 2009). Source accuracy was somewhat impaired, though well above chance with the average performance of 88.8% and did not differ significantly between performed actions (M=88.7%) and imagined actions (M=89.0%). (Kelley, 2009).
Schnitzspahn, K.M., Stahl, C., Zeintl, M., Kaller, C. P., & Kliegel, M. (2013). The role of shifting, updating, and inhibition in prospective memory performance in young and older adults. Developmental Psychology, 49(8), 1544-1553. doi: 10.1037/a0030579
The findings of Timothy A. Allen along with Norbert J. Fortin, and Erika Hayasaki, reveal further insight into the role episodic memory plays in everyday life for humans. Episodic memory can be understood as memory for personal experience. Episodic memory is a type of long term memory that individuals are consciously aware of; making it an explicit memory. With that being said, this type of memory allows people to relive and re-experience memories from their personal past in their mind. This is why many refer to episodic memory as mental time travel. Through mental time travel, individuals are able to recall the circumstances under which they encountered specific experiences. Circumstances can include concepts such as what, where, and when an experience happened. Given the power that this form of memory provides, it is argued that
Memory impairment could refer to a weakening of memory traces, or a clouding of memory, or an intrinsic impoverishment of memory. McCloskey and Zaragoza were against the memory impairment hypothesis.(1985). They argue that misleading postevent suggestions do not affect the availability of originally encoded information. Their hypothesis stems from empirical work using a modified paradigm in which no effect of postevent information is observed. McCloskey and Zaragoza's no impairment hypothesis is also difficult to reconcile with numerous reports of 'blend' memories that reflect a compromise between the original and postevent information Johnson and Lindsay (1986)