PSY2004 W4 Reading Flashcards
Mental exercise and Mental aging
What is the mental exercise hypothesis?
rate of age-related decline in measures of cognitive functioning will be less pronounced for people who are more mentally active or equivalently that the cognitive differences among people who vary in level of mental activity will be greater with increased age.
Lack of empirical evidence for the idea that rate of aging is moderated by amountof mental activity.
What is a limite to the idea that mental exercise positively affect mental ageing?
Notice that individuals with greater amounts of mental stimulation are postulated to have less negative (or more positive) relations between age and level of performance on cognitive tasks. However, the right panel of Figure 3 portrays an alternative possibility that needs to be considered, namely, that people who are more mentally active are likely to have had high levels of cognitive functioning throughout their lives.
Why are RCT used to investigate mental exercise?
to avoid individual differences such as initial level of cognitive ability, amount of education
Are training interventions good?
Training studies have the advantage of controlling the amount and type of experience the individual receives, but they have the disadvantage that the amount of experience is greatly limited in breadth and depth relative to the experience typically acquired in an individual’s lifetime. Many of the training studies involving only older adults were apparently motivated to challenge the cliche´ that old dogs cannot learn new tricks.
What are the limites of ACTIVE?
ACTIVE project has received considerable attention, but some of the interpretations of the findings have been somewhat misleading - demonstrating ‘‘reduced cognitive declines after cognitive training’’.
What is the ACTIVE project?
Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly
All of the participants received the same cognitive assessment at baseline, immediately after the intervention, and again on two annual post-tests. Three training groups relative to the differences from the baseline in the control group at three time periods after the completion of training.
What is the VO2 Max?
common measure of functional physical capacity is maximal oxygen consumption, or VO2max.
A large number of studies have reported that this measure declines with age, dropping approximately 1% per year from the peak. There is also considerable evidence that physical exercise can increase VO2max.
What are 2 limites of training studies?
- age-related differences have been found in a very broad range of cognitive abilities, but the benefits associated with training are usually quite narrow, and sometimes may not even generalize to other variables representing what appear to be the same construct.
- The second limitation of training research as regards the mental-exercise hypothesis is that there have been very few studies with long-term monitoring. Most training programs have been aimed at improving the level of a specific type of per formance immediately after training, and many have been effective at achieving that goal.
Does exercise actually ages us more?
Rather than slowing the rate of aging, exercise might actually accelerate the rate of physical aging – however this counterintuitive result is probably explained by a decrease with age in the amount of exercise, decline in the high exercise group represented a mixture of effects of reduced activity and normal aging.
What are comparison of preexisting groups research?
There are two categories of nonexperimental research relevant to the mental-exercise hypothesis. One category consists of studies of people from special groups who are assumed to differ from other people in the amount and type of mental activity they engage in. The other major category consists of studies in which people are administered questionnaires to evaluate their level of mental activity.
Special groups:Experts and occupational
What is the expert group?
A particularly interesting special group consists of experts in domains such as chess, music, or Go. Because of experts’ extensive experience, it is natural to ask whether they differ from nonexperts with respect to the effects of aging on performance within their domain
What is the conclusion of this paper?
That is, people should continue to engage in mentally stimulating activities because even if there is not yet evidence that it has beneficial effects in slowing the rate of age-related decline in cognitive functioning, there is no evidence that it has any harmful effects, the activities are often enjoyable and thus may contribute to a higher quality of life, and engagement in cognitively demanding activities serves as any existence proof, if you can still do it, then you know that you have not yet lost it.
