Lecture 14 - Memory & Ageing Flashcards
What is episodic memory?
Autobiographical memory, it’s all the Events in your life, in the correct chronological order.
It’s the who what where when’s
Elderly people tend to get people in their stories mixed up and things
Define working memory
Working memory is the ability to simultaneously hold several facts and then manipulate them in your mind
What is a simple way to measure working memory?
Reverse digit span
What does your working memory ability correlate highly with?
General intelligence
What is the decline in working memory likely due to?
Likely due to reduction in overall processing speed like in “g”
What is nominal aphasia?
Not being able to think of the word you’re looking for
What does the pattern of slowing in simple reaction times over the lifespan look like?
sRT slows with age almost immediately from maturity (16-20 years old), declines slowly at first and then it accelerates at 45-50 years.
Probably a decline of almost 1 SD or 15 IQ points, from the age of 18-62
There is a large decline in IQ over the lifespan. What are the two reasons that the decline has not been that noticeable?
1) as you get older crystallised intelligence goes up even though fluid intelligence goes down
2) decline in average IQ over time as we’ve looked at in previous lectures, approximately 1.5 IQ points each decade. Therefore although the elder generations are less intelligent the new ones are born less intelligent.
What is crystallised intelligence?
Knowledge and expertise, like general knowledge and vocab tests
Are personality traits stable over the lifetime?
They are stable in the sense that they remain in the same rank order, however the average level of a trait changes as the group ages.
So if you’re the most extravert age 20 you still will be at 40, even if at age 40 you are much less extravert than your 20 year old self.
What can disrupt the stability of personality?
Disease like dementia, psychosis or brain damage
Using ocean , describe whether each trait goes up, down or stays the same over the lifespan
O - decreases
C - increases to middle age and then decreases
E - decreases
A - increases (aka baron Cohen’s empathising )
N - stays stable ( data is inconsistent)
What is the main social reason for the changes in personality ?
A lot of changes are simply developmental and to do with your priorities. So as a uni student you want high extraversion and low conscientiousness for all the socialising and fun, but as you get older and have kids your priorities change and you want lower extraversion and more conscientiousness
However, most late in life personality changes are due to….
degenerative diseases like dementia and aren’t developmentally adaptive
What 2 aspects of memory decline with age?
Episodic memory
Working memory
