Key Q - Cognitive Flashcards
What is Dementia?
Chronic/persistent disorder of mental processes caused by brain disease or injury marked by memory disorders, personality changes + impaired reasoning
What are the Different Types of Dementa?
- Alzheimer’s disease
- Vascular dementia
- Frontotemporal dementia
- Mixed dementia
What is Mixed Dementia?
Combination of a number of different types of dementia
What is Frontotemporal Dementia?
Predominantly affects personality - can include psychosis + OCD
What is Vascular Dementia?
Result of small strokes degeneration of blood vessels + therefore oxygen to parts of brain
What is Alzheimer’s Disease?
- Affects LTM, increased confusion, language + spatial problems, lacks insight to situation
- Inability to recall recent events, general forgetfulness characterised by losing things, poor organisational skills, poor decision
What are Symptoms of Dementia?
- Loss of memory
- Confusion
- Other cognitive deficits
- Depression
- Mood swings
- Exhaustion
Why is Dementia an Important Issue in Society?
- Dementia affects many people - affects 850,000 people in UK
- One of the major causes of disability + dependancy among older people
- Dementia costs the NHS £23 billion per year
- Dementia causes psychological + economic harm for the people who have it + their carers
- Physical, emotional + financial pressures arise
How to apply Episodic Memory to Help Patients with Dementia?
- Patients don’t lose all memories
- Lose memories of events from in their past
- Tulvings ideas about episodic LTM apply to this
- Patients keep memories from their youth right to the end
- So, to help some practitioners advocate listening to the dementia patients memories + don’t distress by contradicting
How to Apply Semantic Memory to Help Patients with Dementia?
- Semantic memory seems to be lost separately
- Schmolck study into semantic LTM applies to this - they found semantic LTM is stored in a different part of the brain
- Steyvers + Hemmer shown the importance of prior knowledge when trying to recall events - damage to semantic memory can cause failure in the effect of prior knowledge
- So, it would help to give the patient some prior knowledge, through displaying or explaining something
How to Apply Multi-Store Memory Model to Help Patients with Dementia?
- Patients may forget what they’ve been told - If info hasn’t encoded properly or if they have a problem w/ retrieval from STM to LTM
- Which would explain why they say things that don’t make sense
- Successful method - employ more specific questioning rather than general questioning - give person time to rehearse the info one bit at a time - photographs/notes can help replace STM
How to Apply Working Memory Model to Help Patients with Dementia?
- Multi-tasking should be avoided as difficult for people with dementia
- Competition between central executive, phonological loop + visuospatial sketch pad should be avoided as it explain confusion + problems when thinking/reasoning
- So, to help you can reduce background noise when trying to concentrate on another task + only 1 person talking at a time
How to Apply Reconstructive Memory to Help Patients with Dementia?
- Patients w/ dementia may be using mixed schemas or struggling to retrieve the correct schema
- So, to help you could play patients old songs, play childhood games, visit familiar looking places, describe cues to help patient recall the correct schema
What is Cognitive Stimulation?
- Focus on early memories from childhood + young adulthood
- Most patients can access these episodic memories as it fades slower
- Semantic Melody can help link episodic memories together
- Enabling patients time retrieve more and more details from LTM
How is cognitive psychology research into memory for people with dementia useful for society?
- It explains how people with dementia can be helped
- It explains how the memory is made up of different components
- But, you need to take a holistic view - taking social + biological aspects in to account to develop effective treatment plans
What is the Baddeley et al (2001) study which provides evidence for memory models explanation of dementia?
Found:
•Marked impairment in the capacity of Alzheimer’s disease patients to combine performance on 2 simultaneous tasks compared to performance of healthy elderly group
•Shows - how the central executive in WMM is affected by dementia
What is the Steyvers + Hemmer (2012) study which provides evidence for memory models explanation of dementia?
- Investigate interaction between episodic + prior knowledge in a natural environment
- Found - prior knowledge from semantic memory contribute to recall in episodic tasks
- Study high in ecological validity
- Shows how giving patients prior knowledge can help them access episodic memories
What is the Schmolck et al (2002) study which provides evidence for memory models explanation of dementia?
- Studied brain damaged patients
- Conclude - semantic patients whose impairment is restricted to the anterolateral temporal cortex is consistent with a loss of semantic knowledge
- Found - semantic LTM is storer in different part of brain from episodic memory
- But, his cases lack generalisability as they are case studies which are rare + small
How do Tulvings ideas of episodic + semantic LTM apply to Hogeway nursing home?
- Recent episodic memory is lost
- So, patients find their present situation distressing
- Staff don’t contradict resistentes
Why is Validation Therapy considered Controversial?
- Critics say that psychologists have an ethical duty not to deceive people
- Hogeway is a giant deception designed to put dementia sufferers at ease
How can Reconstructive Memory be Applied to the Dementia Village at Hogeway?
- Different parts of the village = different set of schemas
- Patient who grew up wealthy - has schemas as the high class part of Hogeway - find it easier to remember things like episodes/procedures - more active
- This in contrast to normal hospitals - that are strange places for most people
What is the Dementia village?
- De Hogeweyk operated by a nursing home Hogeway
- In Netherlands
- Care for elders w/ dementia
What is the Benefit of using all day Reminiscence Therapy ay Hogeway, Compared to Traditional Nursing Homes?
- Patients are more active
- Patients require less medication
- Patients hace 24-hour care
What is Providence Mount St Vincent Residential Home?
- Residential home for 400 patients
- In Seattle, USA
- Attempts to use holistic ways of helping people w/ dementia
- Offers number of therapies which are founded in cognitive psychology
