PSY2004 W4 Applied Themes in Ageing (L)

Question 1

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

Answer 1

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 2

What are the effects of ageing in more real-world settings, and how does this connect (or not) to basic, lab-based research?

Answer 2

Prosocial behaviour increases with age, and wisdom-related knowledge and age gains in expertise appear to be domain-specific. Disconnects between real life and lab may result from these factors, support structures, and other non-cognitive factors that are absent in the lab.

Question 3

How does intuitive reasoning understanding the brain?

Answer 3

The brain is like a muscle: the more you train it, the more mentally fit you will be

Question 4

How does Theoretical reasoning understand working memory?

Answer 4

WM capacity constrains a wide range of cognitive functions including fluid intelligence. Expanding WM capacity should also benefit the cognitive functions that it constrains

Question 5

What method (intervention/correlational) is best to establish a clear causal role of mental exercise on cognition?

Salthouse, 2006

Answer 5

Intervention methods.
“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 6

What did Singh-Manoux et al. 2003 examine about mental exercise ?

Answer 6

Leasiure activities:
Low cognitive effort VS High congitive effort
Individual VS Social
* 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

Question 7

What is Mill Hill task?

Answer 7

Vocabulary test

Question 8

What is a verbal memory task?

Answer 8

20 word free recall short-term memory test”

Question 9

What is Semantic fluency task?

Answer 9

Semantic fluency: “animal” words—come up with as many as possible in 1 min

Question 10

What correlations were found?

Singh-Manoux et al. 2003

Answer 10

Stronger correlations between cognitive ability and high cognitive effort leisure compared to the correlations between cognitive ability and low cognitive effort leisure.
Stronger positive correlations between high cognitive leisure and cognitive ability compared to the correlations between cognitive ability and low cognitive effort leisure.

Question 11

What is Phonemic fluency task?

Answer 11

“S” words—come up with as many as possible in 1 min

Question 12

What is AH4-I task?

Answer 12

series of 65 items (32 verbal, 33 math) reasoning items of increasing difficulty. Inductive reasoning—identify patterns and infer principles and rules.

Question 13

What is the differential preservation hypothesis (or Preserved differentiation hypothesis)?

Salthouse 2006

Answer 13

Intuitive idea of mental exercise. Mental activity protects against age-related decline in mental ability. Supports the idea of a causative role of mental exercise to at least minimize cognitive decline in older age.

Question 14

What was Salthouse’s argument on Mental activity?

Answer 14

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.

Question 15

What are some methodological issues with training literature?

Mental exercise

Answer 15

Trainding condition, random assignment and pre-test differences in function, active vs passive control grups, publication bias, adaptive procedures, ajusting for task difficulty

Question 16

What are some issues in the mental exercise training literature?

Answer 16

Methodological, theoretical, practical

Question 17

What are practical issues of mental exercise training literature?

Answer 17

maintenance of any training gains over the long-term, initial cognitive ability as a potential oderator of intervention, near and far transfer effects

Question 18

What is a theorital issue of mental exercise training literature?

Answer 18

What are we training exactly?

Question 19

What is the distance issue with training literature/training tasks?

Answer 19

If we train and improve a core cognitive construct like WM, then how much do those improvements translate to other related but distinct constructs?

Question 21

What overall effect did the meta-analysis find on task training studies?

Meta-analysis: Karbach & Verhaeghen, 2014

Answer 21

Positive: training gains in both the trained tasks but also evidence of near adn far transfer. No age differences in the effectiveness of training programs. Games are quite effective and the cognitive skills are transferrd to ther tasks.

Question 22

What did the meta-analysis find on training tasks?

Melby-Lervåg & Hulme, 2016

Answer 22

Training effects exaggerated. Issue with the Karbach & Verhaeghen meta.

Question 23

What were the issue found with the Karbach & Verhaeghen meta?

Melby-Lervåg & Hulme, 2016

Answer 23

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 ided: 2 studies had no control, 1 study is based on the same sampled used in an earlier study, 2 studies left out and 1 outlier?

Question 24

What did Melby-Lervag & Hulme 2016 find in their meta-analyse?

Answer 24

Compared training conditions to contorl conditions for the performence gains of mental exercise over controls in older adulthood.
Showed much more modest far transfer benefits of mental exercise and really nothing at all when you remove the likely outlier study.
They also showed the influence of using untreated (i.e. passive) control groups versus treated (i.e. active) control groups, but here the number of studies that were properly done was very small (k = 4)

Question 25

What is the take-home message for training tasks?

Answer 25

the effectiveness of mental exercise (i.e., training WM) in terms of far transfer is controversial; only clear benefits for trained tasks.

Question 26

What did Sala et al. 2019 find?

Answer 26

Once again highlights the finding that trained tasks show the most benefits, with smaller or even null effects for transfer tasks, as well as the importance of active control groups.
* Large effect of intervention for trained tasks
* Smaller effects for near and far transfer tasks, and null when using studies only with active controls

Question 27

What did Hou et a. 2020 find?

Answer 27

concerned with the long-term effects of WM training interventions and broke down the effectiveness of training for different “subdomains” of WM (and other cognitive abilities. Considered moderators of the age of the participants, the total number of sessions, total hours, type of control, frequency of the sessions, and “study quality”

Question 28

What is healthy ageing?

WHO 2015

Answer 28

sustaining functional ability in everyday life – being mobile, building/maintaining relationships, and lifelong learning

Question 29

What are the characterisitcs of successful ageing?

Answer 29

Engaging in leisure activities positively related to all 3 indicators of successful ageing.

Sports activities related to self-reported everyday failures; gaming activities related to test-based everyday performance.

Question 30

What would be considered adult leisure activity?

Answer 30

Exercise & sport, Watching TV, Eating out, Volunteering, Reading, Visiting friends and Going to cinema and Collecting Stamps, Computers

Question 31

What was the Park et al 2013 study on mental exercise trianing lifestyles?

Answer 31

Intervention Phase: productive engagement (photo,quilt, dual) vs receptive engagement (social[+social - cog], placebo[-cog -social])
Test phase: Cognitive battery (far transfer), processing spped, mental control, episodic memory, visuospatial processing
Baseline Pre-test  Immediate Post-test
Results:
Corrected for multiple comparisons. Episodic memory showed the best benefits from being in the photogrpahy lifestyle groups but little less going on.

Question 32

Can you function normally in society with age-related declines?

Answer 32

Yes, age-related declines can presumably occur in important cognitive abilities (like reasoning) without major consequences for functioning in society.
Even though age is negatively correlated with a number of cognitive constructs that are measured in the lab. Age shows no relationship with other job-related variables that ostensibly still require these cognitive constructs.

Question 33

Why is there a discrepancy between lab results and real life?

age-related declines

Answer 33

Verhaeghen et al 2012 illustrated this disconnect.

Question 34

Where do older adults excel?

Answer 34

Semantic memory

Question 35

Intuitively, could there also be age-related increases in

Answer 35

 Concern for others
 Wisdom
 Expertise

Question 36

How does concern for others increase with age?

Answer 36

Negative behav tendencies (criminal behav) decline steeply throughout adulthood.
Prosocial personality traits adn behavouirs increase accross adulthood.
Charitable giving and volunteering increase across adulthood up to about age 70

Question 37

What is wisdom?

Answer 37

expert knowledge about fundamental questions regarding the meaning and conduct of life

Question 38

What is the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm?

Baltes & Smith 1990

Answer 38

Factual knowledge about human nature and the life course. Procedural knowledge about ways of dealing with fundamental questions about the meaning of life.
Life-span contextualism.
Value relativism and tolerance.
Awareness and management of uncertainty.

Question 39

Why does wisdome increase with age?

Answer 39

Wisdom is neither technical or intellectual knowledge, but intertwines cognition, emotion, and motivation. 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 40

What is life-span contextualism?

Answer 40

a deep understanding about the many contexts of the given life problem, how these contexts are interrelated, and how they change over time

Question 41

What is value relativism and tolerence?

Answer 41

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

Question 42

What is awareness adn management of uncertainty?

Answer 42

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

Question 43

Why are older adults wiser?

Answer 43

• 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 44

What did a Pilot study find about material conflict and suicide with age?

Wisdome

Answer 44

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 45

Why does expertise increase with age?

Strittmatter et al. 2020

Answer 45

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 46

What did the air traffic (ATC) communication study found on expertise, age and aviation communication performance?

Answer 46

Main effects of age and expertise, but no interaction: expertise does not protect against age-related decline in a domain of expertise.
VFR = rated for flying under visual conditions.
IFR = instrument rated, allows pilot to fly in clouds using cockpit instruments.
CFII/ATP = certified flight instructor of pilots in training for IFR; mostly full-time air-transport pilots.
Results:
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.
As you would expect by looking at the correlation between age and ATC performance, there was a significant negative relationship (as we already saw). And there was a positive relationship between expertise and ATC performance. But the authors also measured WMC and this had an even stronger relationship with ATC performance.

Question 47

What explains job performance acrros age?

Answer 47

25% cognitive abilities
75% probable motivation, experience, personality, taks-specific skills