Chapter 4: Mental and Emotional Well-being Flashcards
What are the three major sets of abilities that intelligence consists of?
Problem solving, verbal skills and social competence
Primary Mental Abilities (PMA)
The basic set of intellectual skills, including mathematical reasoning, word fluency, verbal meaning, inductive reasoning and spatial orientation
Fluid intelligence
Ie. Native intelligence encompasses skills such as abstract and mathematical reasoning, spatial relations and perceptual speed. These are biologically determined, independent of our experience or learning
Crystallized Intelligence
The knowledge and abilities - verbal meaning, social judgment, number skills and verbal memory - that we acquire through education and experience
Most intelligence tests taken by older people show what kind of score pattern?
Classic aging pattern of scores
=> the decline observed with aging on some performance scales of intelligence tests versus consistency on verbal scales of the same tests
What are some reasons why older adults may do worse on performance tasks?
Time constraints
Age-related changes in sensory, perceptual and psychomotor skills
Ex. slower reaction times and delays in receiving and transmitting messages through senses, speed of cognitive processing
Do declines in crystallized intelligence appear?
Typically do not show up until advanced old age, or results of disease-related cognitive impairment (ex. dementia)
What are some other factors that can affect intelligence which are not age-related?
- biological factors
- anxiety about test performance
- education
- occupation
- physical health
- nutritional deficits
- nearness to death
- cautiousness in recall situations that involve risk and uncertainty
- numerous problems measuring intelligence
What may be an issue with cross-sectional designs when researching intelligence?
any identified age differences may reflect cohort or generational differences rather than actual age variations
Doesn’t take into account changes in cohort and historical factors
What may be an issue with longitudinal designs when researching intelligence?
Older adults are more likely than younger persons to drop out of longitudinal studies
Those who drop out tend to have performed less well at baseline or their health status and functional abilities are worse than average => results become biased in favour of those who were superior performers at baseline and do not represent the wider older population
Memory
the process of recalling information that was once stored; a part of the brain that retains what has been learned throughout our lives
sensory memory
the first step in receiving information through the sense organs and passing it on to primary or secondary memory
when we rehearse information received from our senses, it is more likely to be passed into our memory
working (primary) memory
holding newly acquired information in storage; a maximum of 7 (+/-) 2 stimuli before processing into secondary memory or discarding it
temporary stage of holding, processing and organizing information
decides what information should be attended to or ignored
Secondary, long-term, memory
permanent memory store; requires the processing of new information to be stored and cues to retrieve stored information
unlimited capacity
How does learning occur?
When the new information or skills that we acquire through our sensory and primary memories become encoded or stored in secondary memory
the information must be rehearsed or “processed” actively in order to be retrieved later
Does aging influence the storage capacity of memories?
No, instead, the process by which we rehearse or encode new information tends to decline in primary memory. This may also occur because perceptual speed deteriorates with aging
Perceptual speed
the time required to recognize and respond to stimulus
General slowing hypothesis
physiological changes that cause slower transmission of information through the nervous system with aging
results in older adults performing worse on complex tasks, although the extent of slowing varies with the task
How does attentional resources and mental energy relate to learning and age?
Aging may cause a decline in attention resources or mental energy needed to organize newly acquired information in order to retain it in secondary memory.
Older people have more difficulty in holding information in their working memory while receiving new stimuli through sensory memory, or ignoring irrelevant stimuli to complete working memory tasks
Tip-of-the-tongue states
Difficulty retrieving names from secondary memory but often spontaneously recalled later
Do older adults rely on spontaneous recall or structured search strategies more?
Spontaneous recall
Executive function
the ability to organize our learning and then efficiently use the information stored in our secondary memory to plan and make decisions and shift attention from one task to another
normal aging is associated with only mild declines in executive function
What can help improve executive function?
Moderate (or more) levels of aerobic activity
healthy diets
volunteering
Three components of attention
selection attention
vigilance, or sustained attention
attentional control
Selective attention
being able to select information relevant to a task while ignoring irrelevant data
Vigilance or sustained attention
keeping alert to focus on a specific stimulus over time
in such complex tasks, older people do worse than young adults, but little difference when task is simple
attentional control
our ability to determine how much attention should be directed at specific stimuli and when to shift our focus to other stimuli
important under conditions of divided attention
divided attention tasks
involve stimuli in the same sensory mode or different sensory systems
environmental and personal factors that negatively affect elders’ learning and memory
Physical: un unfamiliar learning environment, poor lighting levels and small font size, low tone and volume of a test giver’s voice in an oral exam
individual: slowing of the nervous system, verbal ability and educational level, previous experience with similar learning tasks, expectations about a task, English as a second language
Strategies to promote older adults’ learning
- create supportive conditions for learning and test-taking
- use positive feedback
- pace the rate of information flow to allow opportunities to practice the new information
- allow self-pacing and extra time to reduce fatigue
- offer material perceived by the older learning to be relevant
- chunk or break long bits of info into smaller units
Recognition
requires fewer searches because a stimulus in the environment triggers retrieval of that information, such as in multiple-choice tests
cued recall
hints are given to aid in the search, such as the first letter of a word
free recall
no aids are provided for retrieving information from secondary memory
