Psychology of Aging Exam 2

Formal Operations Period

(12+ years). Abstract thought

Primary Mental Abilities

(Thurstone, 1938; Ekstrom et al.,1979; Schaie, 1994, 1996). Numerical facility, Word fluency, Verbal meaning, Inductive reasoning, Spatial orientation, Perceptual speed, Verbal memory

Preoperational Period

(ages 2-6) Egocentrism

Concrete Operations Period

(ages 6-12) Classification, conservation, mental reversing

Sensorimotor Period

(birth- age 2) Object permanence

Recognition

A cognitive process that matches information from a stimulus with information retrieved from memory.

Health

A connection between disease and intelligence has been established in general and in cardiovascular disease in particular. The participants in the Seattle Longitudinal Study who declined in inductive reasoning had significantly more illness diagnoses and visits to physicians for cardiovascular disease. Hypertension is not as clear. Severe HT may indicate decline whereas mild HT may have positive effects on intellectual functioning.

Stereotypes

A special kind of social knowledge structure or social belief that represent organized prior knowledge about a group of people that affects how we interpret new information

Fluid Intelligence (Gf)

Abilities that make you a flexible and adaptive thinker, to draw inferences, and relationships between concepts independent of knowledge and experience

Source Memory

Ability to remember the source of a familiar event and if the event is imagined or experienced. (E.g., Did I take my medicine, or just think about doing it?)

Project ADEPT and Project ACTIVE

Ability-specific training does improve in primary abilities Effects varied in ability to maintain and transfer gains to other abilities/new tasks

Drugs associated with memory problems

Alcohol, Caffeine, Sedatives, Tranquilizers

Immunizing mechanisms

Alter the effects of self-discrepant information

Memory for Pictures

Although older adults are clearly worse in remembering words, researchers did not find significant age differences in memory for pictures. Older adults rely more on schema (i.e., what they expect to see) to "fill in the blanks"

Stereotype Threat

An evoked fear of being judged in accordance with a negative stereotype about a group to which you belong

Implicit stereotypes

Automatically activated negative stereotypes about aging guide behavior beyond our awareness. Includes patronizing speech.

Memory Monitoring

Awareness of what we are doing with our memory at any given moment (e.g., right now). Older adults are still able to monitor their memory.

Situational attributions

Behavioral explanations that reside outside the person

Dispositional attributions

Behavioral explanations that reside within the person

Understanding Speech

Being able to hear is important (presbycusis - age related hearing loss). Age-related decrements in both speech recognition and speech discrimination. Context is important to age-related speech comprehension

Self-fulfilling prophecy

Belief in inevitable decline is potentially damaging

Text Memory and Episodic Memory

Both are affected by a similar set of variables: Pacing, Prior knowledge, and Organization. Being old does not necessarily mean that one cannot remember, especially if the situation provides an optimal opportunity to do so.

Social Context

Can serve a facilitative function in older adults' memory performance. It is important not to limit our explanations of social cognitive change simply to cognitive processing variables, but to also include social factors

Accommodation

Changing one's thought to make a better approximation of the world of experience

Postformal Thought

Cognitive maturity beyond formal operations (Tolerance for ambiguity). Developmental progressions in adult thought (Reflective judgment). Optimal level of development (Skill acquisition). Integrating emotion and logic. Emotion and logic are combined in adulthood

Language production

Coming up with the words/sentences you want to say during a conversation or when writing a letter

External memory aids

Computer or phone, date books or post-it notes

Encoding

Connecting what you hear with what you know

Explicit Memory

Conscious encoding and retrieval

Secondary Mental Abilities

Consists of Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence

Cohort differences

Cross sectional studies show differences, while longitudinal studies do not show decline of intellectual ability with age.

Impression Formation

Declines in cognitive processing resources might impact the social judgment process. Research suggests that we make initial snap judgments and later correct or adjust them based on more reflective thinking. Thus, age-related changes in processing capacity might make older adults more vulnerable to social judgment biases

Vigilance decrement

Decrease in detection accuracy over time Research suggests no age-related declines

Social & lifestyle variables

Differences in cognitive skills needed in different occupations makes a difference in intellectual development. Higher education and socioeconomic status also related to slower rates of intellectual decline

False Fame Effect Experiment

Dywan & Jacoby (1990). Participants given list of nonfamous names to read. Next, given a new list containing: Names from the first list, More nonfamous names, some famous names. Task: which of these names on the second list are famous?

Flashbulb Memories

Emotional, powerful, vivid memories that can be remembered in detail after much time has passed. (E.g., when you found out about 9/11)

Causal attributions

Explanations people construct to explain their behavior

Useful Field of View (UFOV)

Extent of field of vision available in a brief glance. This varies from person to person and situation to situation, and when attentional resources are needed for multiple things. Is a predictor for 13% of accidents. Visual acuity predicts only 5% of accidents.

Selective attention

Focusing on one stimulus, while processing very little of others. We SELECT what we want to attend to!

Language comprehension

Handling information that comes in via information and processing and understanding what it means

Social Belief Systems

Has three important aspects: 1. We must examine the specific content of social beliefs, 2. Consider the strength of these beliefs to know under what conditions they may influence behavior, and 3. We need to know the likelihood that these beliefs are being violated or questioned.

Primary Control

Helps change the environment to match one's goals. It involves bringing the environment into line with one's desires and goals. Similar to assimilative strategies. It has more adaptive value to the individual.

Personality

High levels of fluid abilities and a high sense of internal control lead to positive changes in people's perception of their abilities

Patronizing speech

Includes slow speech, simple vocabulary, careful enunciation, a demeaning emotional tone, and superficial conversation

Types of Memory

Information goes through stages as it comes in

Accommodative strategies

Involve readjusting one's goals and aspirations

Wisdom

Involves practical knowledge. Is given altruistically. Involves psychological insights. Based on life experience

Metamemory

Knowledge of how our memory works

Semantic Memory

Learning and remembering the meaning of words and concepts. Forming new memories may be easier with the use of your episodic memory

Short Term Memory/Working Memory

Limited capacity. About seven chunks of information (Miller, 1956). Involves holding and manipulating information that you are using right now. Plays an active, critical, and central role in encoding, storage, and retrieval. Older adults, presented with multiple tasks, do poorly compared to younger.

Later stages

Long term memory

Complex reaction time

Making many decisions about when and how to respond (driving tasks)

The Psychometric Approach

Measuring intelligence as a score on a standardized test. Focus is on getting correct answers

Autobiographical Memory

Memory about you, your life, your experiences

Internal memory aids

Mental imagery, Method of loci, Mental retracing, Acronyms

Automatic Processing

Minimal demands on out attention processing resources. Usually fast and does not require conscious awareness

Highway accidents

Not age per se, but decreased skills. We also need to realize that older adults are involved in far fewer accidents overall --- they drive less and are more experienced.

Vigilance performance

Number of targets correctly detected over a period of time Research suggests age-related declines.

Choice reaction time

Offers more than one stimulus and require a response to each in a different way

Negativity Bias

Older adults also weigh negative information more heavily in their social judgments than young adults do. In particular, older adults are more willing to change their initial impression from positive to negative. But are less willing to change an initial from negative to positive even in light of new positive information

Expertise

Older adults compensate for poorer performance through their expertise. Expertise helps the aging adult compensate for losses in other skills

Functional perspective

One way to distinguish normal and abnormal changes depends on disruption of performance of daily living tasks

Age-based double standard

Operates when people judge older adults' failures in memory

Piaget's Theory

Proposed four stages of cognitive development: the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational period.

Secondary Control

Reappraises the environment in light of one's decline in functioning. The individual turns inward toward the self and assesses the situation. Similar to accommodative strategies. This simply minimizes losses or expands levels of primary control.

Carstensen and Turk-Charles (1994) memory experiment

Recall a passage from a novel. Emotional vs. neutral text. Young adults remembered more material, but it was Neutral. Older adults remembered emotional material.

Episodic Memory

Recalling information from a specific event or time

Correspondence bias

Relying on dispositional information and ignoring situational information

Prospective Memory

Remembering to perform a planned action in the future, or remembering to take one's medication. Correlated with busy lifestyle as well as age

Early stages

Sensory memory - when information is just coming into our system, and Attention

Rating scales

Structured interviews and Checklists are types of this

Behavioral and self-report assessments

Tests involving everyday tasks show great promise in accurately assessing memory function

Sustained attention/Attention Span (vigilance)

The ability to maintain attention over a long period of time

Long Term Memory

The ability to remember extensive amounts of information from a few seconds to a few hours to decades

Divided attention

The degree to which information competes for our attention at any given time (Multi-tasking)

Personal Control

The degree to which one believes that one's performance in a situation depends on something that one personally does

Information Processing Model

The information-processing approach is based on three assumptions: 1. People are active participants in the process 2. Both quantitative (how much) and qualitative (what kind) aspects of performance can be examined 3. Information is processed through a series of hypothetical stages or stores.

Crystallized intelligence (Gc)

The knowledge acquired through life experience and education in a particular culture. (E.g., Jeopardy)

Recall

The mental process of retrieval of information from the past

Richness of Encoding

The more connections (coding) the more likely the information can be recalled

Encapsulation

The processes of thinking become connected to the products of thinking Neurological development and social demands play a smaller role, and experience plays a larger role.

Driver simulator training

This group did not improve on reaction time, but did show improvement on skills on which they were trained.

Speed of processing

This group made fewer dangerous maneuvers than at baseline, such as ignoring traffic signals and misjudging the space between cars. Also improved reaction time.

Relevancy of tasks

Traditional tests have high correlation with tests that have been updated to measure actual tasks faced by older persons (concurrent validity)

Depression and Dementia

Two disorders that distort the thought process and memory

Implicit Memory

Unconscious encoding and retrieval

Processing Resources Hypothesis

Underlying mechanisms of reduced resources is not fully understood, but there is support for resources in some way.

Assimilation

Use of currently available information to make sense out of incoming information

Assimilative strategies

Used when one must prevent losses important to self-esteem

Effortful Processing

Uses much of our available attentional capacity. Usually slower and requires conscious awareness. (E.g., learning new tasks)

The Cognitive-Structural Approach

Ways in which people conceptualize and solve problems emphasizing primary and secondary mental abilities

Text-Based Level

When text is clearly organized there are fewer age-related differences. Older adults adversely affected by rapid presentation, highly unpredictable or unorganized material, and densely presented material. Age-related differences disappear when speed-of-presentation variable is removed (Make it self-paced). However, older adults are less likely than young adults to remember exact wording from the text.

Social Knowledge

When we are faced with new situations we draw on our previous experiences stored in memory. To do so, this structure must be available to guide behavior

Motivational Model

Which information is most important for me to know?

Middle stages

Working Memory - Limited-capacity. More active currently used information

Decision Making

Younger adults make decisions quicker than older adults. Older adults search for less information to arrive at a decision. Require less information to arrive at a decision. Rely on easily accessible information. Older adults do not make poorer quality decisions

Situation Model

Younger and older adults are similar in ability to construct and update situation models. Exception: older adults consistently have slower reading times. Benefits of prior knowledge is similar for older and younger adults. Social context matters in the way stories are retold—for older adults, it depends on the listener.