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Highlighting and Reducing the Impact of Negative Aging Stereotypes During Older Adults' Cognitive Testing
Published on: January 24, 2020
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What-where-when memory and encoding strategies in healthy aging.
1Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB23EB, United Kingdom lgc23@cam.ac.uk.
Learning & Memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.)
|February 18, 2016
Summary
Older adults struggle with memory for item-associations, possibly due to difficulties initiating encoding strategies. This study found that externalizing these strategies can help older adults improve their memory integration.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Neuroscience of Aging
- Human Memory Research
Background:
- Older adults often show significant deficits in associative memory, specifically recalling relationships between items.
- These memory impairments are hypothesized to arise from reduced self-initiation of effective encoding strategies.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the role of self-initiated encoding strategies in older adults' associative memory deficits.
- To examine whether externalizing encoding demands can mitigate these memory impairments.
Main Methods:
- Utilized the "treasure-hunt task", a episodic memory test assessing item, location, temporal order, and integrated what-where-when information.
- Compared memory performance in older adults under conditions manipulating the self-initiation of encoding strategies.
Main Results:
- Older adults demonstrated deficits in memory integration, particularly for what-where-when information.
- Self-initiated encoding strategies, when externally supported, significantly improved older adults' memory integration abilities.
- Externalizing strategy demands reduced the burden on working memory and attentional resources.
Conclusions:
- Older adults' associative memory deficits can be ameliorated by employing self-initiated encoding strategies.
- Externalizing these strategies is a viable method to support memory function in aging.
- Interventions focusing on strategy use may enhance episodic memory in older populations.
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