DEP 3464 - Psychology of Aging - Exam 2

Everyday competence

- a person's potential ability to perform a wide range of activities considered essential for independent living. - It is not the person's actual ability to perform the task, but the complex interaction of a person's physical, psychological, and social functioning - Broader than just ADL or IADL - Necessary determinate for whether an elderly person can take care of themselves

Project ADEPT and Project ACTIVE

-Ability-specific training does improve some primary abilities. •Project ADEPT (Baltes & Willis, Penn State) was successful in raising scores on the primary abilities trained, in some individuals to the level from which they originally declined -Effect varies in ability to maintain and transfer gains •Other attempts to train fluid abilities -Schaie and Willis' cognitive training showed improvement in spatial and reasoning abilities both with people whose abilities were declining and improvement in those whose abilities had stabilized. •Long-term effects of training -Seven year follow-up to the original ADEPT showed significant training effects. -64% of trained group's performance was above the pre-training level compared to 33% of the control group.

Other research has identified a progression from absolutist thinking to relativistic thinking to dialectical thinking

-Absolutists thinking •Involves believing there is only one correct solution to problems and that personal experience provides truth -Relativistic thinking •involves realizing that there are many sides to any issue and that the right answer depends on the circumstances -Dialectical thinkers •see the merit in different viewpoints and are able to synthesize them into a workable solution

Congregate Housing

-Apartment complex for older adults •Shared meals •Affordable -Differs from assisted living in level of services -Residents must be capable of independent living and: •Not require continual medical care •Know where they are and be oriented to time •No evidence of disruptive behavior •Able to make independent decisions •Be able to follow specific service plans

Episodic Memory (Long Term)

-Conscious recollection of information from a specific event or point in time -Many day-to-day activities we perform fall into episodic memory; as a result, this is the most researched area of memory -Age-related declines DO tend to occur in episodic memory -Research often involves learning information and then recalling or recognizing information at a later point •Older adults perform worse than younger adults on recall tests (tend to omit info, repeat previously recalled items) -These difference are large, with 80% of adults in their 20s outperforming adults in their 70s •Differences between younger and older adults are reduced on recognition tests -However, older adults are more likely to accept never presented items, especially if they are conceptually or perceptual similar -Older adults tend not to use organizational strategies, but when instructed to do so performance improves somewhat

Adult Day Care

-Designed to provide support, companionship, and certain services during the day -Goal is to delay placement in more formal care setting. -Three types of adult day care 1.Social services, meals, recreation, and minor health care 2.More intensive health care, therapy, for serious medical problems 3.Specialized care for dementia or developmental disabilities.

Deciding on the Best Option

-Does the individual have significant cognitive or physical impairment requiring intervention? •What is the severity? -What is the available support system like (friends/family) -In all cases, it is much better for the individual to be an integral part of the decision making. -Get a physician's diagnostic evaluation (required in many states).

Implicit memory (procedural memory)

-Facilitation or change in task performance that is attributable to having been exposed to information at some earlier point in time, but does not involve active explicit memory -An example is a language task such as stem completion -Smaller age differences that explicit memory

Factors That Preserve Memory: Cognitive Reserve

-Factors that lessen decline by providing flexibility in responding and adapting to changes in the environment •Exercising memory -Thinking of memory as a mental muscle •Multilingualism and Cognitive Functioning -Research suggests that older adults who speak four or more languages had the best cognitive state independent of education. •Negative Stereotypes and Memory Performance -Older adults do worse on memory task if they believe that age hampers memory ability.

Home Modification

-Helping people deal with tasks of daily living by modifying the environment •Hook for car keys near the door •Hand rails in bathrooms •Door handles that are easier to grasp •Widening doorways •Lowering countertops •Wheelchair ramps

Explicit memory (declarative)

-Intentional and conscious remembering of information that is learned at a specific point in time -An example is remembering who wrote the Gettysburg address. -Tend to observe age-related differences

Wisdom

-Involves practical knowledge -Is given altruistically -Involves psychological insights -Based on life experience •Implicit conceptions of wisdom are widely shared within a culture and include: -Exceptional level of functioning -A dynamic balance between intellect, emotion, and motivation -A high degree of personal and interpersonal competence -Good intentions

Dual Component Model of Intellectual Functioning

-Mechanics of intelligence •Involves the neurophysiological architecture of the mind, including basic information processing components, problem solving, spatial orientation, and perceptual speed -Changes are greatest during childhood and adolscence -Pragmatics of intelligence •Includes everyday cognitive performance and adaptation, such as verbal knowledge, wisdom, and practical problem solving •Acquired knowledge

Two additional abilities added by Schaie:

-Perceptual speed •one's ability to rapidly and accurately find visual details and make comparisons -Verbal memory •the ability to store and recall meaningful language units

Assisted Living

-Provides a supportive living arrangement for people who need assistance with personal care (bathing, taking medication), but are not physically or mentally impaired to enough require 24-hour care. -Costs average about $35,000 per year. -Not offset by Medicare -Medicaid may subsidize if individual's financial situation merits. -Government assistance expected to be limited in the future. Has three essential attributes 1.As much like a single family house as possible 2.Emphasizes personal control, choice, dignity, and autonomy 3.Should meet routine services and special needs 4.These facilities are generally smaller and cost less than nursing homes

Aging in Place

-Reflects a balancing of environmental press and competence through selection and compensation. -Being able to maintain independence - vitally important to many older adults. -Feeling "at home" •Leaving ones home can be extremely traumatic. -Cluster housing. •Services are provided to older adults living independently.

Special Care Units

-Supportive environment for people with moderate to sever dementia requires certain specialized design and intervention features -Special care units must have the right level of environmental support to provide additional care when the person's competence level continues to decline. -Design elements that take functional limitations into account •Memory aids should be built into the unit. -Special care for residents with severe cognitive impairments

Gender issues and postformal thought

-Theorists have hypothesized that the ways of knowing for women differ from men, but research evidence does not provide strong support for this view

Integrating emotion and logic

-belief that adults make choices not so much on logical grounds but on pragmatic, emotional, and social grounds -Mature thinkers realize that thinking is a social phenomenon that demands making compromises and tolerating ambiguity and contradiction

Formal Operations Period

-the endpoint of cognitive development acquired during adolescence; characterizes all adult thought •This mode of thinking emphasizes hypothetico-deductive thought or hypothesis-testing •The goal is the identification of a single correct solution •A way of conceiving abstract concepts and thinking about them in a very systematic way •Governed by generalized logical structure that provides solutions to problems that people have never seen and may never encounter

Three fundamental questions (Info Processing Model)

1.Which areas show evidence of age differences in the aspects of processing? •Early stages (e.g., attention, working memory, long term memory?) 2.How can we explain variability when we find age differences in information processing? 3.What are the practical implications of age-related changes in information processing?

What on earth are all these theoretical frameworks possibly useful for?

Among other things, we use these frameworks to help us identify the sorts of environments that would best suit a given older adult - quality of life matters!

Person—Environment interactions conceptualized (Kurt Lewin, 1936)

B = f(P, E) Where: B = Behavior P = Person E = Environment

Five Criteria for Wisdom-Related Performance

Basic Criteria - Factual Knowledge: To what extent docs this performance .show general (conditio humana) and specific (e.g., life events, variations, Institutions) knowledge about life matter.s and demonstrate scope and depth in the coverage of issues? -Procedural Knowledge: To what extent does this performance consider strategies of decision making (e.g.,cost-benefit analysis), self-regulation, life interpretation, life planning (e.g.,means-ends analysis), and advice giving (e.g., timing, withholding)? Metalevel Criteria -Life-span Contextualism: To what extent does this performance consider the past, current, and possible future contexts of life and the many circumstances (e.g., culturally graded, age-graded,idiosyncratic) in which a life is embedded and how they relate to each other? -Value Relativism: To what extent docs this performance consider variations in values and life priorities and the importance of viewing each person within his or her own framework of values and life goals, despite a small set of universal value.s such as the orientation toward the well-being of oneself and others? -Awareness and Management of Uncertainty: To what extent does this performance consider the inherent uncertainty of life (in terms of interpreting the past, predicting the future, managing the present) and elective strategies for dealing with uncertainly (e.g., backup solutions, optimizing gain-loss ratio )?

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The Big Picture: 4 Concepts for Intelligence Theory

Multidimensional / Multi-Directional / Plasticity / Inter-individual Variability

Attentional and Perceptual Processing

Sensory Memory / Attentional Processes -Age differences are not typically found in sensory memory; however, they do begin to appear when attention is involved

Common Theoretical Themes

The focus must be on interactions between the person and the environment

Modifying primary abilities

Training seems to slow declines in some primary abilities.

Adaption Level

Where behavior and affect are normal, slight increases in press improve performance, slight decreases create a Zone of Maximum Comfort.

Inter-individual variability

acknowledges that people differ from each other

Environments

can be classified on the basis of the varying demands they place on the person, a notion called environmental press.

Competence

is the theoretical upper limit of a person's capacity to function.

Multidimensional

refers to fact that many abilities that underlie intelligence

Multi-directionality

refers to the fact that there are many possible ways individuals may develop or change over the life span

Plasticity

refers to the range within which one's abilities are modifiable

Who is Likely to Live in Nursing Homes?

• Characteristics of People Most Likely to Be Placed in a Nursing Home -Over age 85 -Female -Recently admitted to a hospital -Lives in retirement housing rather than being a homeowner -Widowed or divorced -Has no children or siblings nearby -Has some cognitive impairment -Has one or more problems with IADL • Health issues and functional impairment -Average resident has significant mental and physical problems -One third of residents have mobility, eating or incontinence problems. -30 to 40% show signs of clinical depression.

The Congruence Model

•According to Kahana's (1982) congruence model, people with particular needs search for the environments that meet them best. •Some examples? 1.A person without personal transportation seeks a house near a bus route. 2.A handicapped person needs a home adapted to a wheelchair (no steps). 3.An elderly person may need to relocate to an assisted-living facility.

Attentional Processes

•Are influenced by the capacity to direct and sustain attention and the speed at which information is processed •In a sense, attention can be thought of as selection

Secondary Mental Abilities

•At least six secondary mental abilities have been found, with two receiving the most attention: -Fluid Intelligence (Gf) •Abilities that make you a flexible and adaptive thinker, to draw inferences, and relationships between concepts independent of knowledge and experience -Examples include solving mazes, puzzles, and knowing which letter comes next in a series •tends to show normative age-related decline -Crystallized Intelligence (Gc) •The knowledge acquired through life experience and education in a particular culture -Examples include knowing answers on Jeopardy such as definitions of words, historical facts, and literature •does not normally decline with age until very late life

When examining the cognitive declines associated with normal aging, one primary domain of interest is ATTENTIONAL CONTROL

•Attentional control is thought to primarily take place in the frontal lobe and is associated with working memory, inhibitory control, task switching, etc. •All of these processes are related to executive function

Autobiographical memory

•Autobiographical memory is another type of long term memory storage (primarily episodic), and involves remembering information and events from our own lives - see your book for details (pages 200-201).

Piaget's Theory

•Basic concepts -Intellectual development is adaptation through activity which stems from the emergence of increasingly complex cognitive structures -Adaptation: the process of adjusting thinking to the environment •Assimilation -Use of currently available information to make sense out of incoming information •Accommodation -Changing one's thought to make a better approximation of the world of experience -Organization: thought is organized into a coordinated whole and is reflected in cognitive structures that change across the lifespan

Going Beyond Piaget: Postformal Thought

•Cognitive maturity beyond formal operations -characterized by recognition that the correct answer varies according to situation, solutions must be realistic to be reasonable, ambiguity and contradiction are the rule rather than the exception, and emotion usually play a role in thinking -Developmental progressions in adult thought (Perry) •Reflective judgment -how people reason through dilemmas involving current affairs, religion, science and the like (e.g., appropriateness of stem-cell research) -How is reflective judgment characterized? -Optimal level of development »highest level of information-processing capacity of which a person is capable (can change as people progress) -Skill acquisition »describes the gradual, and somewhat haphazard, process by which people learn new abilities (related to optimal development)

Moderators of Intellectual Change

•Cohort differences -Comparing longitudinal studies with cross-sectional designs show little or no decline in intellectual performance with age •For example, scores on verbal meaning, spatial orientation, and inductive reasoning increased from the 1889 cohort to the 1952 cohort in Schaie's research •Information processing -Perceptual speed, working memory, and ability to inhibit tend to show decline during later adulthood and account for changes in both fluid and crystallized intelligence •Social and lifestyle variables -Occupations that require complex thought and independent judgment raise the level of people's intellectual functioning; this is especially true for older workers -Also related to slower rates of intellectual decline: •Higher education and socioeconomic status •Exposure to stimulating environments •Strong social connection •Personality -High levels of fluid abilities and a high sense of internal control (self efficacy) lead to positive changes in people's perception of their abilities. -People with flexible attitudes at midlife tend to experience less decline in intellectual competence than people who were more rigid in middle age •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. -Further changes in sensory functioning (visual and auditory acuity) are related to declines in fluid intelligence

Age-Related Changes in Primary Abilities

•Data from K. Warner Schaie's Seattle Longitudinal Study of more than 5,000 individuals from 1956 to 1998 in six testing cycles: -People tend to improve on primary abilities until late 30s or early 40s. -Scores stabilize until mid-50s and early 60s. -By late 60s consistent declines are seen. -Nearly everyone shows a decline in one ability, but few show decline on four or five abilities.

Memory and Mental Health

•Depression -Feelings of helplessness and hopelessness •Dementias -Declines in cognitive performance •Irreversible and untreatable •Studies found that negative effects of depression on memory are greater in young and middle-aged than in older adults.

Text-Based Levels

•Discourse -Collectively includes reading books, magazine, newspapers, and pamphlets and watching television and movies - information people have read or heard •Research reveals several important points -With clearly organized text, older adults are similar to younger in recalling more main ideas than details; disorganized text creates problems. -Rapid presentation of unorganized material puts older adults at a disadvantage compared to younger. -Higher presentation speeds put older adults at a disadvantage; age differences decrease when self-pacing is used -Material that is dense in propositions (basic ideas) puts older adults at a disadvantage •Does it make a difference if new information agrees or disagrees with what people already know? -Older adults recall less if the new information contradicts previously held beliefs.

Normal versus Abnormal Memory Aging

•Distinguish by asking if changes disrupt a person's ability to function in everyday life -Repeatedly forgetting to turn off the stove -Forgets the way home •Alzheimer's -Progressive destruction of memory •Wernicke-Korsakoff -Loss of recent memory and sometimes inability to form new memory

Training Memory Skills

•E - I - E - I - O Strategy -External aids •Notebooks or calendars -Internal aids •Imagery, rote rehearsal, method of loci, mnemonics -Explicit (direct aids, intentional recollection) -Implicit (indirect aids, unconscious information, e.g., color coding) -O! or Aha! (suddenly remembering) •Memory Drugs -Only modest, short term improvement -No medical breakthroughs •Combining Strategies -What works with one may not work for all

Age Differences in Encoding versus Retrieval

•Encoding -Research suggests age-related decrements in encoding, not in storage •Elaborative rehearsal is a type of an encoding process that involves making connections between incoming information and information already known. -Older adults have more difficulty making these connections than younger adults -However, once connections are made, they are maintained at the same rate as younger adults •Retrieval -Age differences exist for tip-of-the-tongue states and feeling-of-knowing (feeling you know something yet not sure what) after failure to retrieve information •Based on research evidence, age-related differences occur at both encoding and retrieval, with encoding problems being especially important •Use of strategies during encoding -Organizing and establishing links are two strategies •Older adults do not spontaneously organize incoming information or make meaningful links as well as younger adults •For example, older adults are less likely to organize related words, such as lake and river, into a broader category -Data on strategy usage do not fully explain age-related differences in encoding (i.e., introducing a strategy does not fully eliminate differences) •More research needed

Speed of Processing

•How quickly and efficiently these early steps in information processing are completed •How fast you can react to a stimulus is an index of sensory memory function •Speed of processing tends to slow with age, but this does not appear to explain all cognitive decline; other factors are involved as well (e.g., response selection)

Decision-Making Capacity and Individual Choices

•How well can a nursing home resident make decisions regarding their care? -Cognitive impairment -Patient Self-Determination Act (PSDA) •requires people to complete advance care planning when admitted to a health care facility that receives Medicare and Medicaid funds -Assessing a person's capacity to make medical decisions is difficult and often done during times of crisis •Living will •Patients normally give the decision to family members.

Situation Models

•Include features besides text-based information, such as emotional information, goals, and personality characteristics of main characters as well as spatial relationships among the people, objects, and events described (like when reading a story) •Different people remember differently depending on their situation or perspective. -Older and younger use similar updating and construction strategies; however, older adults are generally slower. -Another performance variable is prior knowledge or experience. •Both older and younger do better on familiar material. -The listener matters •When retelling details of a story, older adults appear to adapt better to the needs of the listener

Denny's Model of Unexercised and Optimally Exercised Abilities

•Intellectual abilities related to problem solving follow two developmental trajectories -Unexercised ability •The ability a normal, healthy adult would exhibit without practice or training (fluid intelligence) -Exercised ability •The ability a normal, healthy adult would demonstrate under the best conditions of training or practice (crystallized intelligence) •Both show improvement through early adulthood and slowly decline thereafter

Intelligence in Everyday Life

•Intelligence involves more than just a particular fixed set of characteristics. •Laypersons and experts agree on three clusters of intelligence: -Problem-solving ability -Verbal ability -Social competence •Motivation, intellectual effort, and reading are important indicators of intelligence behaviors for all people

Stress and Coping Framework

•Interaction with the environment can produce stress •Older adults' adaptation depends on their perception of environmental stress and their attempts to cope •Evaluating one's situation and surroundings for potential threat value -Harmful -Beneficial -Irrelevant

Age Differences in Memory Monitoring

•Involves knowing what you are doing mentally right now •Participants asked to predict how well they will do on a memory task. -Predictions without experience (i.e., estimating your performance without having a chance to see if what we are up against is hard) •Older adults tend to over estimate how well they will do compared to younger. -Predictions after experience (i.e., when you have a chance to see the task before making a performance prediction) •Older adults are just as accurate as younger. -Regardless of age, adults overestimate performance on recall tasks but underestimate performance on recognition tasks.

Prospective Memory

•Involves remembering to perform a planned action in the future (remembering to remember) -Somewhat surprisingly, older patients remember to take medication better than busy middle-aged patients. •Differences between event-related and time-related future events. -Time based remembering is vulnerable to age-related decline. -Difficult or complex prospective tasks are not remembered well by older adults. -Self-generated memory cues help. •Notes on a calendar, medication dispensers with time/date cues

Memory, Nutrition, and Drugs

•Little is known about the effects of nutrition on memory. •Alcohol and caffeine, if abused, will affect memory. •Sedatives and tranquilizers have been found to impair memory.

The Role of Memory Self-Efficacy

•Memory self-efficacy -The belief that one will be able to perform a specific task -Different than metamemory in that one may know a good deal about how memory works, but still believe they possess low ability to perform a specific memory task. -Memory successes tend to bolster self-efficacy, and failures reduce one's belief of memory competence. -Overall, older adults with lower memory self-efficacy translate to poorer memory performance •But these same older adults are more likely to rely on someone else or use strategies to help themselves remember

Aspects of Memory Self-evaluations

•Metamemory -knowledge about how memory works and what we believe is true about it •Memory Monitoring -awareness of what we are doing with our memory right now

Nursing Homes

•Nursing homes house the largest number of older adults in long-term care, provide 24 hour care, and are strictly regulated by states •Two levels of care are defined in federal regulations. 1.Skilled nursing care consisting of 24-hour care, including medical and other health services 2.Intermediate care also 24-hour but at a lower intensity

Practical Problem Solving (getting away from standardized tests)

•Observed Tasks of Daily Living (OTDL) -Consists of three dimensions (food preparation, medication intake, and telephone use) of practical everyday problem solving and is used to determine if people can live alone •Importantly, performance on ODRL (practical problems) is influenced by age, along with elements of psychometric intelligence (fluid and crystallized intelligence) and information processing (perceptual speed and memory) •Other research has shown that social problem solving and practical problem solving were related to each other and to crystallized intelligence, while traditional problem-solving ability is related to measures of fluid intelligence

Age Differences in Metamemory

•Older adults -Seem to know less about how memory works than younger -View memory as less stable -Expect that memory will deteriorate -Perceive they have less control over memory •Belief in inevitable decline is very strong among older adults, but does not apply equally to all areas of memory •For example, remembering names declines more quickly than remembering events that happened long ago

Decision Making

•Older adults are less effective at decision making than younger adults when: -The situation is novel or unfamiliar to them -Decisions need to be made under time pressure -A high degree of working memory capacity is required •For example, when the task is complex and requires holding lots of information in memory simultaneously -However, there are no age differences in the quality of decisions made •Younger adults are faster to arrive at a decision, but the ultimate quality of the decision is similar to that of older adults

The Emerging Role of Automatic Retrieval

•Older adults are more vulnerable to misinformation (familiar information is heavily weighted) -False-fame effect •Mistaking familiarity for fame -Older adults show larger false fame effects for conscious recollection, while non-conscious automatic retrieval (familiarity) of information does not decline with age -Misinformation and memory •Source memory -The ability to remember the source of a familiar event as well as if the event is real or imagined does not decline with age •False Memory -When one remembers items or events that did not occur »Remembering childhood abuse that never happened »Picking a person out of a lineup that is innocent -Older adults are more vulnerable

Expertise

•Older adults compensate for poorer performance through their expertise. -Expertise helps the aging adult compensate for losses in other skills (e.g., air traffic controllers). •Encapsulation -Refers to the idea that the process of thinking (e.g. attention and memory) becomes more connected to the products of thinking (e.g., knowledge about a topic) -Thought to be how older adults might use expertise to compensate for other declines

Inhibitory loss

•Older adults have reduced processing resources due to greater difficulty inhibiting the processing of irrelevant information •Older adults have more trouble selectively attending to relevant information when irrelevant and relevant information are both presented in the same modality (i.e., they are more easily distracted) •Certain strategies can compensate for irrelevant information interference -For example, if you ask older adults to close their eyes or avert gaze from distracting information they perform as well as younger adults -There can also be positive effects of distraction (e.g., gait control)

How Not to Communicate with Residents

•Patronizing speech •Infantilization or baby "talk" •Inappropriate use of first names •Terms of endearment—"Honey," "Sweetie" •Assumption of greater impairment than may be the case •Cajoling to demand compliance

The Measurement of Intelligence

•Psychometric approach focuses on whether answers to questions are correct, and on how these answers relate to each other -Major goal is to measure ways relationships are organized: •The structure of intelligence is described as a hierarchy -Lowest level - individual test questions -Second level - tests -Third level - primary mental abilities; reflects the relations between performance on intelligence tests -Fourth level - secondary mental abilities; includes relations between primary mental abilities •Factors: when performance on one test is highly related to performance on another test -Most researchers believe there are several factors that make up intelligence

Piaget's Theory (Four Stages)

•Sensorimotor Period -Babies and infants gain knowledge by using sensory and motor skills •Object permanence (objects continue to exist even when out of sight) •Preoperational Period -young children's thinking is not logical and is often egocentric (all people experience the world as they do; e.g., dolls feel pain) •Concrete Operations Period -logical reasoning emerges; however, they are still unable to deal with abstract concepts (e.g., the concept of love is still hard to grasp) •Formal Operations Period -Abstract thought

New Directions for Nursing Homes

•The Eden Alternative -The ten principles of the Eden Alternative (p. 174). -Use of pets and other approaches seem to make stronger associations between current and former living situations. •Quality of Life difficult to assess using traditional methods. •Further research needed in this area. •Green House Project -Grounded in the Eden Alternative aims at providing older adult who need skilled nursing care, a small homelike environment. •Only 6-10 residents live there •Encourages residents to participate in their care through helping with daily tasks -Personal dignity is maintained and quality of life is improved. •The Pioneer Network -focus on changing the culture of aging in America irrespective of where older adults live •Older persons are valuable to society. -Treating all people with dignity -Psychological benefits including increases in self-efficacy and improvements in mood are associated with regular exercise

Long Term Memory

•The ability to remember extensive amounts of information from a few seconds, hours, or decades. -Semantic Memory •Learning and remembering the meaning of words and concepts that are not tied to specific occurrences of events in time (e.g., knowing definitions of words) •Appears to be minimal change in sematic memory with age, though some decline after age 65 occurs •No age-related declines in language comprehension, structures of knowledge, and activation of general knowledge (think of all of this as being related to acquired knowledge) •The major area in which we see age-related decline in semantic memory is in its accessibility -Older adults have more trouble retreiving a word when presented with a definition, and have more tip-of-the-tongue experienc

Divided Attention

•The ability to successfully perform more than one task at the same time •Older adults do not multi-task as well as younger adults (e.g., writing while listening, conversing while driving) •Research demonstrates that age differences are found in some situations and not others -No differences found on easy tasks, but are found on complex tasks -No age differences found when older adults are given extensive practice •Extensive practice can minimize the poor performance on multi-tasking....sometimes •Older adults use strategies to compensate for difficulty in multi-tasking.

Working Memory

•The active processes and structures involved in holding information in mind, sometimes in conjunction with incoming information, to solve a problem, make a decision, or learn new information -Plays an active, critical, and central role in encoding, storage, and retrieval -Limited capacity; only a few items can be processed at once -Unlike a more passive short-term memory, working memory shows a greater age-related decline •Capacity declines with age seems to be related to -Declines in storage capacity -Declines in ability to allocate capacity to more than one task -Slower rates of information processing •Declines not universal, however they are greater -For spatial working memory than for verbal working memory, although there are declines in both -In the evening compared to the morning -On more complex task relative to simpler ones

Processing Resources

•The amount of attention one has to apply to a particular situation (if you're into that sort of theory!) •There have been a number of alternative ways of examining a process resource hypothesis. •Thought to diminish with age; you have less water in the pool the older you get -The decline in available resources might be related to difficulties in inhibitory control

Characteristics of Nursing Homes

•The competence-environmental press model -Goal is to find the optimal level of environmental support for people at low levels of competence -In selecting a nursing home relatives should keep the following in mind: •Level of skilled nursing care •Is the director and upper staff fully licensed? •Is the care plan put in place by professionals? •Ask questions about staff educational levels and staff turnover.

Research Approaches to Intelligence

•The psychometric approach -Measuring intelligence as a score on a standardized test •Focus is on getting correct answers •The cognitive-structural approach -Ways in which people conceptualize and solve problems -Emphasizing developmental changes in modes and styles of thinking

Primary Mental Abilities

•Thurston's primary mental abilities: -Numerical facility •basic skills underlying one's mathematical reasoning -Word fluency •how easily one can produce verbal descriptions of things -Verbal meaning •one's vocabulary ability -Inductive reasoning •one's ability to extrapolate from particular facts to general concepts -Spatial orientation •one's ability to reason in the three-dimensional world in which we live

Information-processing approach

•Uses a computer metaphor to explain how people process stimuli -Information enters the system (in this case the brain) and is transformed, coded, and stored in various ways •The information-processing approach is based on three assumptions: 1.People are active participants in the process. 2.Both quantitative (how much information is remembered) and qualitative (what kind of information is remembered) aspects of performance can be examined. 3.Information is processed through a series of hypothetical stages or stores.

Can a Nursing Home Be a "Home?"

•What can be done to foster the sense of "home?" -Being included in the decision and selection of a specific nursing home -Having prior knowledge of, and positive experience of a specific facility -Defining the home in terms of family and social relationships rather than place, objects, or total autonomy -Establish a continuity between home and nursing home -Reminiscing about home may facilitate adjustment •Person-centered planning -Based on promoting residents' well-being through increasing their perceived level of personal control and treating them with respect. -Focus on the individual -Involves team who knows and cares -Can decrease the need for certain medications with this approach

Sensory memory

•Where new, incoming information is first registered •Has a large capacity and holds an identical sensory representation, but is very short-lived store •Memory details are dependent on how much attention is given to the stimuli; if attention is given, then the info is passed to the next stage of memory. •If information is not attended to then it is lost