PSY2004 W2 Cognitive Ageing

Question 1

How do crystallized abilities (semantic memory, SM) change with age?

Answer 1

SM improves across the lifespan due to acquired education/life experience and age-impaired brain areas being less involved in SM

Question 2

How do fluid abilities (e.g., episodic memory, EM) change with age?

Answer 2

EM declines across the lifespan, with deficits greatest for associative/bound information that requires explicit recollection

Question 3

How do processing speed and working memory (WM) contribute?

Answer 3

Older adults are slower overall compared to younger adults, but age differences in WM capacity are particularly important for fluid abilities

Question 4

How does the Lifespan Perspective understand multidirectionality?

Baltes, 1987

Answer 4

Even within the same domain, diversity or pluralism are evident in the directionality of ontogenetic change. The direction of change depends on the behavior. Even within the same developmental period, some systems of behavior show increases while others show decreases in functioning.

Question 5

What is the mechanics of intellingence?

Answer 5

The basic architecture of information processing and problem solving. It deals with the basic cognitive operations and cognitive structures associated with such tasks as perceiving and classification.

Question 7

What are the pragmatics of intellingence ?

Answer 7

the content- and knowledge-related application of the mechanics of intelligence:
(a) fairly general systems of factual and procedural knowledge, such as crystalized intelligence,
(b) specialized systems of factual and procedural knowledge, such as occupational expertise, and
(c) knowledge about factors of performance or skills relevant for the activation of intelligence in specific contexts requiring intelligent action.

Question 8

What are the different patterns found with cross-sectional vs longitudinal studies?

Hedden & Gabrieli, 2003 Nature Review Neuroscience

Answer 8

many abilities decline with age in cross-sectional studies, with some staying constant or showing a little improvement, data from the same study that are longitudinal show a much less of a dramatic drop off in performance, and declines are evident in all domains except for processing speed after 55.

Question 9

How does age affect semantic memory?

meta-analysis Verhaeghen

Answer 9

Positive effect size: Older adults are performing better than younger adults.
Overall older adults are 0.80 SD’s higher in vocabulary than younger adults. (Cohen: large effect size). There is great variability in the strength of the effect sizes even though they are all positive.

Question 10

How do older adults perform on vocab tests?

Answer 10

Outperform YA on vacb tests, espeically MCQs
The point is that older adults have just had more time and education to be exposed to this information, thereby causing them to show an age-related benefit compared to the typical decline we might expect in memory.

Question 11

What is semantic memory/crystalized intellingende bound to?

Answer 11

Culturally bound knowledge. your ability to perform well on this test strongly relies on the fact that you have been exposed to this information before.

Question 12

What is fluid intelligence?

Answer 12

are meant to test reasoning ability that is devoid of any cultural influence

Question 13

What did Mayor et al. 1994 find?

Semantic Memory

Answer 13

accuracy on the specialized subject questions was not at all correlated with age, but general knowledge accuracy was positively correlated with age.
Semantic memory improves as people grow older, but more for general knowledge

Question 14

What is the idea of network of nodes and semantic memory?

Answer 14

OA have a denser network of nodes that support their semantic memory. Measured implicitly by looking at semantic priming

Question 15

What is semantic priming? How is it measured?

Answer 15

list of words and non-words and have to decide whether they are words or not as fast as they can

Question 16

What is semantic priming effect?

Answer 16

observed when participants are slightly faster to respond to words that are related to the previously presented word versus unrelated

Question 17

How is semantic memory underlined in the brain?

Answer 17

A diffuse network of brain regions. These brain areas are shared with other sensory/perception and motor/action areas. Less dependence on areas that decline in older age (e.g., hippocampus).

Question 18

What is abstract reasoning?

Answer 18

It’s knowledge not based on culutral knowledge aka Fluid Intelligence

Question 19

What are processes underlying our retrieval of events and episodes of our life (episodic memory)?

Answer 19

Recollection and Familiarity.

Question 20

How do you test Recollection and Familiarity?

Episodic memory

Answer 20

Remember/know test.
if I present a series of words for participants to try to remember, I may then test them afterward during a recognition test where I re-present those words amongst entirely new words, and ask them for the words that they recognize as “old”

Question 21

What is Recollection?

Answer 21

‘remember’ retrieving the specific contextual, associative perceptual ect details an event.

Question 22

What is Familiarity?

Answer 22

‘know’ memory in the absence of retrieving specific details.

Question 23

What is the dual process theory ?

Raz et al. longitudinal study

Answer 23

Investigated the brain regions that reduce in volume in healthy older age versus stay stable or show minimal reduction.

It is not just decline when it comes to the brain – there are select regions like the hippocampus and caudate nucleus that decline in structural integrity, whereas other areas like the entorhinal cortex remain relatively stable

Question 24

What is Double dissociation and why is it important?

Dual process thoery Yonelinas et al. 2007

Answer 24

Link between recall and hippocampus vs. entorhinal cortex and recognition.
Important because these particular areas have been respectively linked to recollection and familiarity across the lifespan.
Results: performance on recall tests was more strongly associated with the structural integrity of the hippocampus, whereas performance on the recognition test was more strongly related to the volume of the entorhinal cortex.

Question 25

What is the difference of recollection and familiarity?

Answer 25

The volume of the areas of the brain responsible for recollection (i.e., the hippocampus) is more likely to decline compared to areas of the brain (i.e. entorhinal cortex) supporting familiarity.

Question 26

How does WM interact with other varaibles?

Marshall et al 2015

Answer 26

Other factors impact WM ability: cumulative stress built up over life.
2 different WM tasks: n-back task + Sternberg tasks
Results: older participants who had a high degree of cumulative stress were much more impaired at the WM tasks, whereas low stress older adults showed similar performance to the younger adults!

Question 27

What is the n-back task?

WM

Answer 27

judge whetehr the presented nb is the same as the one presented 2 back

Question 28

What is the Sternberg task?

WM

Answer 28

participants were presented with letters and then decided if the single probe was in the list (so the answer to the single N is “yes”)

Question 29

How is WM affected by age?

Answer 29

Older adults tend to have lower WM capacity than younger adult. It is commonly observed that age is negatively correlated with WM capacity – as you grow older, your ability to keep information active in mind decreases. WM capacity is the maximum amount of information that you can maintain efficiently in WM

Question 30

What is working memory?

Answer 30

memory from moment to moment

Question 31

What are 3 theories of ageing linked to episodic memory?

Answer 31

Dual process theory
Associative deficit hypothesis
Source monitoring framework

Question 32

How does the dual process theory understand the affect of age on episodic memory?

Answer 32

More deficient in recollection and less deficient in familiarity

Question 33

How does the source monitoring framework understand the affect of age on episodic memory?

Answer 33

more deficient in memory for source and context and less deficient in memory for specific content/items

Question 34

How does the associative deficit hypothesis understand the affect of age on episodic memory?

Answer 34

More deficient in memory associations and less deficient in memory for individual items

Question 35

What type of memory is preserved in older age?

Answer 35

Memory for meaningful source: Joint source memory, semantic source memory and non-semantic source memory

Question 36

What is joint source memory?

Answer 36

the likelihood that you jointly remember the two sources of location and relatedness

Question 37

What is semantic source memory?

Answer 37

the likelihood that you remember the relatedness source (i.e., whether it was from a related or unrelated pair)

Question 38

What is non-semantic source memory?

Answer 38

the likelihood that you remember the location source (i.e., whether it was on the left or right)

Question 39

What is the digit symbol test?

Answer 39

it’s a common test of processing speed. The idea is that the faster your processing speed, the more symbols you could draw out for each number. Furthermore, the older you get, the slower you are, and thus you will be less able to draw out as many symbols as when you were younger

Question 40

Does processing speed affect cognition?

Answer 40

It constrains cogntiion: there is limited time to execute cognitive operations. Redution in the amount of simultaneously available information

Question 41

What is a cause for age-related decline in proformance on WM tasks?

Answer 41

Thus, processing speed is argued to cause age-related decline in performance in WM tasks.

Question 42

How does Processing speed affect OA’s WM?

Answer 42

. Older adults’ slower speed of processing means that fewer cognitive operations on information in WM can be completed before that information is lost
2. Less information is simultaneously accessible in WM because encoding and rehearsal of information is also slowed compared to younger adults

Question 43

IS speed difference actually a cause for WM capacity?

Answer 43

Speed difference is not a cause but a consequence of the age difference in WM capacity. Speed-accuracy trade-off: older adults prefer accuracy to speed compared to younger adults (Starns & Ratcliff, 2010)

Question 44

What is the difference in decline in STM and WM?

Answer 44

What we often observe is that WM tasks like reading span and STM tasks like forward digit span show different trajectories across the adult lifespan. Although both show declines as people grow older, the decline is steeper for WM compared to STM

Question 45

How does WM capacity affect all other cognition?

Answer 45

All these abilities are going to be fundamentally constrained by your efficiency to keep information active in working memory. If your working memory is inefficient, then necessarily you will encounter difficulties doing a range of other tasks that rely on it.
Its capacity constrains other many other higher-order cognitive abilities, such as fluid intelligence and long-term episodic memory

Question 46

What does Structual equation modelling show?

Answer 46

show that using the method of including many tasks to represent processing speed and WM shows their unique contributions to other higher order cognition

Question 47

What does Salthouse (1996) found?

Answer 47

showed that when adding processing speed to the model, the relationship between age and other factors like fluid intelligence declines – statistically controlling for processing speed accounts for the relationship between age and other higher-order cognition