Lecture 8: Applied Themes in Ageing

Question 1

What is intuitive reasoning?

Answer 1

• The brain is like a muscle: the more you train it, the more mentally fit you will be
  
  • It is classes as intuitive reasoning as a lot of people would endorse this theory as it makes sense
    The people who are super sharp seem to be quite mentally active (correlation)

Question 2

Theoretical Reasoning

Answer 2

• WM capacity constrains a wide range of cognitive functions including fluid intelligence (Gf)
  Expanding WM capacity should also benefit the cognitive functions that it constrains
• suggests that although working memory and intelligence are correlated, working memory gains will not automatically translate into gains in other cognitive functions

Question 3

How to study mental exercise

Answer 3

• Studies fall into two types: description versus intervention
• They can also fall under cross-sectional versus longitudinal
  Once again, the only way we can know that mental exercise has an impact on psychology, particularly cognition, is to use the intervention method
• Salthouse, 2006: “Effects immediately after an intervention can be interesting and important, but they are not necessarily informative about age-related changes in mental ability that occur over a period of years or decades.”

Question 4

Singh-Manoux et al., 2003 Journal of Epidemiological Community Health- procedure

Answer 4

-Surveyed well over 10,000 people about a variety of issues relating to health and socioeconomic status, but they also asked about people’s leisure activities
- They sorted these leisure activities according to those that require low cognitive effort (household tasks), (BLUE) vs. high cognitive effort (courses and education), (RED).
- They also sorted them by whether they were individual (I) or social (S), but we will not be focusing on that at the moment.
- The question is whether activities entailing high cognitive effort are more strongly related to people’s cognitive abilities than low cognitive effort activities, i.e., that mental exercise is related to cognitive benefits

- They then examined how people’s reports of their leisure activities correlated with not only indicators of their socioeconomic status (SES), but also measures of cognitive function--Establish the correlation between mental activity/exercise and cognitive decline

Tasks:
- Verbal memory: “20 word free recall short-term memory test” lol that’s not STM
- AH4-I: series of 65 items (32 verbal, 33 math) reasoning items of increasing difficulty. Inductive reasoning—identify patterns and infer principles and rules.
- Mill Hill: vocabulary test
- Semantic fluency: “animal” words—come up with as many as possible in 1 min
Phonemic fluency: “S” words—come up with as many as possible in 1 min

Question 5

Singh-Manoux et al., 2003 Journal of Epidemiological Community Health- Results

Answer 5

• There seem to be stronger correlations between cognitive ability and high cognitive effort leisure compared to the correlations between cognitive ability and low cognitive effort leisure
  This gives some evidence to the idea that there is a relationship between engaging in cognitively effortful activities (i.e., mental exercise) and cognitive ability, but once again just like the physical exercise correlational study by DiPrieto and colleagues that I showed you last week, we don’t know the source of this relationship.

Question 6

Mental Exercise (Salthouse, 2006 Perspectives on Psychological Science)- differential preservation hypothesis vs preserved differentiation hypothesis

Answer 6

DIFFERENTIAL PRESERVATION HYPOTHESIS- mental activity as a factor that protects against age-related decline in mental ability

The intuitive idea of mental exercise is the differential preservation hypothesis, i.e., that mental activity protects against age-related decline in mental ability
This hypothesis supports the idea of a causative role of mental exercise to at least minimize cognitive decline in older age
Salthouse’s argument: perhaps the people who engage in mental exercise and show correspondingly high levels of cognitive function always were better than their peers who engage in low mental exercise. Importantly, if you compare people of different mental activity at a given older age, you are unlikely to disambiguate between these explanations.

PRESERVED DIFFERENTIATION HYPOTHESIS- Mental activity is at least partly a manifestation of one’s prior level of mental ability

The intuitive idea of mental exercise is the differential preservation hypothesis, i.e., that mental activity protects against age-related decline in mental ability
This hypothesis supports the idea of a causative role of mental exercise to at least minimize cognitive decline in older age
Salthouse’s argument: perhaps the people who engage in mental exercise and show correspondingly high levels of cognitive function always were better than their peers who engage in low mental exercise. Importantly, if you compare people of different mental activity at a given older age, you are unlikely to disambiguate between these explanations.

Question 7

Major issues in the training literature

Answer 7

Major issues in the training literature
- Methodological
○ Training conditions (i.e.,
number of sessions)
○ Random assignment and pre-
test differences in function
○ Active vs. passive control
groups
○ Publication bias
○ Adaptive procedures-
adjusting for task difficulty
- Theoretical- what are we training
exactly?
- Practical
○ Maintenance of any training
gains over the long-term
○ Initial cognitive ability as a
potential moderator of
intervention
○ Near and far transfer effects

Question 8

What are near and far transfer effects?

Answer 8

Finding your keys/glasses is this example is an example of far transfer – it is not at all like playing Sudoku, but we assume that you need the same strong cognitive abilities to do something like this, or other everyday activities that are important to autonomous living, like paying your bills, driving, planning events of your life, etc.
We intuitively expect that playing Sudoku is not just going to make you better at Sudoku, but it should yield benefits to things that are not at all the same thing as Sudoku (far transfer) and definitely things that are at least more similar to Sudoku, like filling at crossword puzzles (near transfer)
When it comes to the WM training literature, people have tested this same idea by administering a task of WM that participants are trained on, and then they also test whether there are improvements on other WM tasks (near transfer), tasks that are meant to test similar concepts as WM such as updating (medium transfer), and tasks that are related to WM but considered distinct constructs such as fluid intelligence/reasoning (far transfer)
Far transfer is the gold standard – for example, why play lots of Sudoku for mental exercise if it’s not going to actually have practical benefits of activities like finding your keys/glasses?

Question 9

Mental Exercise: Training Tasks (Karbach & Verhaeghen, 2014 Psychological Science) results

Answer 9

Meta-analysis
Given the many task training studies, a meta-analysis can help determine its overall effect
This particular meta-analysis is quite positive:
Training gains in both the trained task but also evidence of near and far transfer
No age differences in the effectiveness of training programs

Question 10

Training effects exaggerated? Issues with the Karbach & Verhaeghen meta-analysis

Answer 10

Far transfer = reasoning and task-switching merged
No correction for baseline differences between groups
Unclear which studies were used in the meta-analysis. Of the 17 identified:
2 studies had no control group
1 study is based on the same sample used in an earlier study
2 studies left out
1 outlier? (Borella et al. 2010)

WHEN CORRECTING FOR THESE ISSUES…
- we see very little gains at all, with very few properly done studies (k = 4)

Question 11

Even more recent meta-analysis—> take home message: the effectiveness of mental exercise (i.e., training WM) in terms of far transfer is controversial; only clear benefits for trained tasks

Answer 11

Sala et al., 2019 Intelligence
- N = 2140, m = 43, k = 698
Large effect of intervention for trained tasks
Smaller effects for near and far transfer tasks, and null when using studies only with active controls

Hou et al., in press JGPS
- N = 1276, m = 22, k = 26
Significant long-term effects of intervention on updating, shifting, inhibition, and maintenance (“near” transfer)
Weaker or null effects for far transfer tasks

Question 12

Mental Exercises: Lifestyles- the characteristics of successful ageing

Answer 12

• WHO (2015) healthy ageing: sustaining functional ability in everyday life – being mobile, building/maintaining relationships, and lifelong learning
  Rowe and Kahn (1987) Science: the characteristics of successful ageing:

1. high cognitive and physical functions
2. low probability of disease and disability
3. active engagement in life

Question 13

Mental Exercises: Lifestyles

Answer 13

• Engaging in leisure activities positively related to all 3 indicators of successful ageing (Sala et al., 2019, PLoS ONE)
  Sports activities related to self-reported everyday failures; gaming activities related to test-based everyday performance (Guye et al., 2019 JGPS)

Question 14

Mental Exercise: Training Lifestyles (Park et al., 2013 Psychological Science) Intervention Phase vs Test Phase

Answer 14

1. Productive engagement: activities that require active learning and sustained activation of working memory, LTM, and other executive processes
   
   2. Receptive engagement: passive observation, activation of existing knowledge, and familiar activities rather than the acquisition of novel information and engagement on cognitively challenging tasks (e.g., going to the cinema, playing games, or pub lunches in groups)

Social engagement may play a role too—this study could isolate those effects by having a placebo group that has no social activities (filling out crossword puzzles and watching documentaries independently)

Prediction: Ss in the productive engagement conditions should show improved cognition vs. receptive engagement conditions, especially such that photo shows better verbal memory and quilt shows better visuospatial abilities

Intervention Phase
- Productive engagement: photo, quilt, dual, vs. Receptive engagement: social (low cognitive demand), placebo (low social and cognitive demand); no contact control
- First five conditions required 15 hr/week structured activities for 3 months

Test Phase
- Cognitive Battery (Far Transfer)
- Processing speed (digit comparison), mental control (Flanker tasks), episodic memory (immediate and delayed recall and recognition memory), visuospatial processing (CANTAB spatial memory task, Stockings of Cambridge Task, modified Raven’s)

• One study tried to “train” such lifestyles to get an idea of whether having an active, engaged lifestyle has a causative role in enhancing successful ageing
  OAs aged 60-90 (M = 71.67 years)

Question 15

Mental Exercise: Training Lifestyles (Park et al., 2013 Psychological Science)- results

Answer 15

• Corrected for multiple comparisons
• Episodic memory showed the best benefits from being in the photography lifestyle group, but little less going on
• Why would EM be selectively benefitted? The theory is not so clear here

Question 16

Does mental exercise (tasks, lifestyles) minimise age-related decline?

Answer 16

Training effects are most robust for trained tasks but show less reliable retention of the gains over time or generalisation to other tasks; many methodological issues. Training lifestyles may be more ecologically valid, but not clear what the underlying theory is.

Question 17

Disconnect from lab and real life?(Salthouse, 2011)- results

Answer 17

Middle/older aged people as CEOs are over-represented even though top reasoning ability is most evident in younger ages.

Age-related declines can presumably occur in important cognitive abilities (e.g., reasoning) without major consequences for functioning in society.

As we have seen, age is negatively correlated with a number of cognitive constructs that are measured in the lab.

Yet age shows no relationship with other job-related variables that ostensibly still require these cognitive constructs.

What may explain this discrepancy?

Question 18

Where do older adults excess?

Answer 18

• Semantic memory

Intuitively, could there also be age-related increases in…
- Concern for others
- Wisdom
- Expertise
- Altruism

Question 19

Concern for others- explanation

Answer 19

• Negative behavioural tendencies, like criminal behaviour, decline steeply through adulthood (Cornelius et al., 2017; Vachon et al., 2013).
  
  • Prosocial personality traits and behaviour increase across adulthood (Roberts et al., 2006)
  • Charitable giving and volunteering increase across adulthood up to about age 70 (Freund & Blanchard-Fields, 2014; Midlarsky & Hannah, 1989)

As Mayr and Freund (2020) review, there are a great deal of possible underlying reasons for these changes
- One of them is that older adults have accumulated greater wealth on average over time and have less constraints on their time
- However, these age differences are observed even when controlling for wealth, and if anything, poor people tend to give proportionally more than people of greater wealth
In fact, there are likely a myriad of reasons why conscientious and prosocial behaviour increase with age that involve both practical concerns (time and financial resources) but also other factors, like a change in approach to the cost-benefit ratio of prosocial behaviour

Question 20

Wisdom- explanation

Answer 20

Berlin Wisdom Paradigm (Baltes & Smith, 1990)
- Factual knowledge
- Procedural knowledge
- Life-span contextualism
- Value relativism and tolerance
- Awareness and management of uncertainty

Berlin Wisdom paradigm is among the most influential for studying wisdom, defined as “expert knowledge about fundamental questions regarding the meaning and conduct of life” (Baltes & Kunzmann, 2003; Baltes & Smith, 1990)

- Wisdom is neither technical or intellectual knowledge, but intertwines cognition, emotion, and motivation.
- According to this paradigm, there are five criteria to describe this expert knowledge:
	○ Factual knowledge about human nature and the life course
	○ Procedural knowledge about ways of dealing with fundamental questions about the meaning and conduct of life
- Life-span contextualism – a deep understanding about the many contexts of the given life problem, how these contexts are interrelated, and how they change over time
- Value relativism and tolerance – acknowledgement of individual and cultural differences in values and life priorities; tolerance and even embrace of various and often opposing viewpoints on a life problem and how to deal with them in a balanced way
- Awareness and management of uncertainty – an understanding that life decisions, evaluations, or plans will never be free of uncertainty, and must be made well as one can and not be avoided in resignation

In the paradigm participants are presented with vignettes about life problems like the one above and trained raters evaluate responses using the 5 criteria specified defining wisdom-related knowledge

Question 21

Older and the wiser for it? -explanation

Answer 21

• Across 4 studies (N = 533), Staudinger and Baltes (1996) showed a non-significant relationship between wisdom and chronological age

Why?
- Cohort effects?
- Relevance of the task to your own life? (Smith et al., 1994; Thomas & Kunzmann, 2013)

- Wisdom develops through life experience, but not everyone who accumulates experience becomes wiser Several studies have suggested that the nature of the wisdom task or scenario might moderate age differences in age-related knowledge

Question 22

Wisdom (Thomas & Kunzmann, 2013, Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences)

Answer 22

Video clips and vignettes depicting life problems concerning marital conflict and suicide
Pilot study confirmed that marital conflict is more relevant to younger adults
Younger adults showed greater wisdom for marital conflict than older adults, but no differences between age groups for suicide

Question 23

Expertise (Strittmatter et al., 2020 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)- results

Answer 23

125 years and over 24k chess games
Comparing individual moves in each game against an optimal move suggested by a chess engine
Performance increases until early 20s and plateaus up to 35 years old, with a decline in age thereafter
As calendar years increased, overall increase in chess performance

Question 24

Expertise (Castel, 2007 Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences)

Answer 24

• The ideas of enhanced semantic memory in older age and wisdom within one’s own domain dances around the idea that one has the opportunity to develop very specific expertise in their domain of interests or professional experience
  
  • We already discussed the associative binding deficit
  • Perhaps prior knowledge can facilitate the associative binding necessary for a task, especially for seemingly arbitrarily paired information
  • 48 YAs vs. 48 OAs vs. 12 retired accountants/book-keepers studying moderately related or unrelated information (two-digit, object, location)
  • Relatedness: between-Ss (book-keepers all did the unrelated trials)
    ○ 18 short phrases
  • Cued recall test: locations presented one-at-a-time, Ss had to recall the number and the object
  • Significant 3-way interaction: OAs recalled less than YAs did when the information type was quite specific (numerical), but negligible differences were evident for recall of related information.
  • Consistent with what we’ve seen before in Naveh-Benjamin (2000) re: semantic relatedness
  • 2-way interaction with accountants for unrelated phrases: older retired accountants displayed excellent memory for numerical information, so much so that they did not differ from the YAs
  • Object recall was still better for the YAs—thus there is some DIVERGENT validity that the expertise is specific to the particular domain (numerical information)
    Anything missing?? Needs a YA accountant group

Question 25

Expertise (Taylor et al., 2005 Psychology and Aging)

Answer 25

• Cognitive ability vs. expertise: wider age range than the last study that allows for a comparison of whether the effects of expertise are similar across age groups
  
  • Study of air-traffic controller (ATC) communications: does expertise moderate the effect of age on aviation communication performance?
  • 97 licensed civilian pilots between 45-69
  • Different expertise levels: (each successive level encompasses ratings of the prior)
    ○ VFR = rated for flying under visual conditions (n = 25 – recreational pilots)
    ○ IFR = instrument rated, which allows a pilot to fly in clouds by using cockpit instruments to navigate (n = 53)
    ○ CFII/ATP = certified flight instructor of pilots in training for IFR and/or certified to fly large transport planes (n = 19 – most were full-time air-transport pilots)
  • All Ss did 5 flight simulations with 16 tape-recorded ATC messages that varied in difficulty (normal vs. fast speech rate; three vs. four items in a single message)
  • Clear effects of age and expertise on performance, but no interaction
    More specific performance on the speed/difficulty of the task: no significant effects/interactions with age or expertise, just overall effects of speed/difficulty of the task

Question 26

Career and Job Performance- explanation

Answer 26

Career and Job Performance
Salthouse, 2011 Annual Review of Psychology
Besides ATC, where are the correlations between age and job performance?
1. Seldom need to perform at one’s maximal level
2. Shift with age from novel processing to reliance on accumulated knowledge
3. Cognition is not the only determinant of success in life
4. Accommodations: on the part of the individual to conceal deficits, environment/technology changes, etc.

1. Age-related declines could impact real-world functioning, but they are often not detected because people seldom need to function at the level at which deficits might be manifested. That would be too stressful.
2. Shift from fluid abilities to crystallized abilities—and this shift is what happens with increasing age anyway.
3. Meta-analyses suggest that cognitive abilities account for 25% of the variance in job performance across age—what does the other 75% of the variance reflect, then? Probable: motivation, experience, personality (i.e., conscientiousness), task-specific skills, etc. For example, driving: OAs may avoid driving in rush hour, at night, on unfamiliar routes, etc. to reduce the effects of their existing sensory/cognitive decline. Advances in technology have also allowed for more environmental support to reduce cognitive demands.