How Is Your Memory?, page 3

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Brain Basics Glossary Brain Functions

How Is Your Memory? Page 3
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Mental Laspes you Don't Need to Worry About
Signs of Normal, Healthy Age-related Decline

Baseball Player About 47% of older adults over 80 will develop AD (or dementia), and there is enormous variability in the “normal” or “acceptable” age-related changes shown by people who do notdevelop the disease. Some 80-year-olds show obvious deterioration in mental agility without necessarily being classified as demented. Other 80-year-olds show little change at all. So should we accept the “acceptable” changes after all? We need to to ask why some people change more than others, and to ask ourselves what we can do about it.

One of the reasons driving skill tends to fall off in old age is that reaction time slows down. This slowing affects simple and more complex forms of response to events. An example of simple reaction time is a need quickly to apply the brakes or turn the wheel if a dog runs into the road. Deciding whether an upcoming freeway exit is the correct one to take is an example of a more complex decision that need fast reaction time

How Are You Doing?
Failing Memory

Older people tend to perform worse on a variety of memory-related tasks, even when they are not under time pressure. For example, they tend to have more difficulty remembering the details of a newspaper article than younger adults do. Some researchers propose that slower processing speed lies at the root of the typical, age-related drop in memory skills. They say that because new information is being processed more slowly as it comes in, the memory traces of one piece of information have begun to decay before the next piece of information is received. The brain cannot reach back to combine the pieces into a meaningful, coherent whole, which is essential to remembering details. We do not yet know whether this kind of memory problem a result of slower processing or even if it should be accepted as inevitable and “natural.” Some interesting research shows that, in fact, many such “normal” signs of aging can be prevented by exercising the mind in certain ways.

A Skill That Does Not Decline With Age: Vocabulary Every one of these adjectives relates to an animal. Which animal? (They get harder farther down the list.)
	1. feline 2. canine 3. equine 4. leonine 5. porcine	6. piscine 7. lupine 8. bovine 9. aquiline 10. phocine
Hint: In Nabokov’s novel Lolita,the narrator Humbert refers to Lolita’s mother, lounging by the swimming pool in a black one-piece, as “her phocine mama.”
Scoring: 5 = average 6 = good 7= very good 8 = excellent 9-10 = outstanding

Your Essential Thinking Tools
Working Memory and Executive Skills

Working memory (which the scientific community shortens to “WM”) is the ability to keep information in mind while the brain manipulates it in some way, a task that commonly becomes more difficult with aging. For example, to multiply 7 X 13 in one’s head, the brain must remember the numbers involved — 7 and 13 — and then perform an operation — multiplication — on them. First the brain must break the problem down into 7 X 10, plus 7 X 3. Then, the brain must remember what it has accomplished at each step, as it proceeds to further steps.

Executive Planning

Executive functions are closely related to Working Memory, and both faculties typically weaken with age. These uniquely human skills help to select goals, devise strategies to attain those goals, and monitor progress toward implement those strategies. The goals can be as simple as working out the right order in which to do all the tasks necessary to cook a meal, or as complex as attaining a college degree. Executive skills are considered a “higher-order,” recently evolved aspect of human intelligence. Even though executive ability applies to skills other than memory, it is clear that the on-line monitoring and manipulation of data involved in WM depends on wellfunctioning executive skills.

Memory Interference

One important way that irrelevant information can impact memory performance has been called interference by psychologists. Suppose that someone bought a short story anthology, and read two of the stories in one sitting. In this case, it would be harder to remember all the details of both stories as well as if the reader had waited a few hours or days before reading the second one. This loss is due to interference. Memory of one story interferes with long-term memory of the other. If the first one blots out the second, that is called proactive interference; if the second interferes with recalling the first one well, that is retroactive interference.

Why did I get up and come into this room?

Here is a common example of retroactive interference: A person thinks of something that needs attention in another room then rises and goes there. On the way, because of something seen or heard, another task comes to mind. “Why,” the person wonders, “did I come into this room?” Interference disrupts memory for all kinds of things at all ages, from stories to the score of a tennis game to people’s names. However, it is one of the memory-related problems that tends to get worse as people age. In particular, proactive interference — the way that something learned at 2:00 interferes with the memorization of something encountered at 3:00 — affects older people more strongly than younger people.

Memory Span Test
An important skill required for effective working memory is the ability to store information temporarily and then refer back to it on demand. This test demonstrates that ability.

(1) Read the following sentence aloud. Then click on the button and answer the question.

“The bus driver motioned the red truck to continue, which turned left, stopped by the third driveway, and sounded its horn twice.”

(2) Read the following sentence. Then click on the button and answer the question.

“The acrobat discussed game theory with a trained harbor seal riding on a tiger in a wagon pulled by a white stallion.”