Unit 3 - Chapter 6 of Text - Attention and Memory Flashcards
- 1 - Overview of Information Processing
- Information processing
- Attentional and perceptual processing
6.1 - What are the primary aspects of the information-processing model?
- It uses a computer metaphor to explain how people process stiumuli
- Information enters the system, is transformed into code, and stored in various areas in the brain
- Information enters temporary storage (the computer’s buffer) until it is stored more permanently, as on a disk
- When needed, it can be recalled from the disk through the command to retrieve a file
6.1 - What are the areas where we observe differential age changes in attention and memory?
6.1 - What are the 3 assumptions underlying the information-processing approach?
1) People are active participants in the process
2) Both quantitative (how much information is remembered) and qualitative (what kinds of information are remembered) aspects of performance can be examined
3) Information is processed through a series of processes
a) Incoming information is transformed based on such things as what a person already knows about it
6.1 - What are the 3 fundamental questions for adult development and aging used in the information-processing model?
1) Which areas of information processing show evidence of age differences (early stages of processing such as attention, working memory, long-term memory)?
2) How can we explain variability when we find age differences in information processing?
3) What are the practical implications of age-related changes in information processing?
6.1 - Describe the importance of sensory memory.
- All memories start as sensory stimuli
- Sensory memory takes in huge amounts of information very quickly and reproduces a representation of the stimuli in your mind
- If not paying attention, sensory information can be lost very quickly
- Age differences are not typically found in sensory memory
- 2 - Attentional Control
- Speed of processing
- Processing resources
- Inhibitory Loss
- Attentional Resources
- Integration: Attention and cognitive change in older adulthood
6.2 - What is processing speed?
What age differences are found in processing speed?
- How quickly and efficiently these early steps in information processing are completed
- Age-related slowing of processing speed is specific to different kinds of processing, rather than across the board
6.2 - What are the processing resources that underlie information processing?
Why do older adults have more problems performing more difficult tasks, or tasks on which they have had little practice?
- With increasing age comes a decline in the amount of available processing resources, the amount of attention one has to apply to a situation
6.2 - What is inhibition loss? When are age differences found?
- Inhibition loss refers to the the difficulty one has inhibiting the processing of irrelevant information
- Older adults have more task-irrelevant thoughts during processing and have trouble keeping them out of their minds
- This explains why older people have trouble switching and dividing their attention
- To help older adults with this, get them to close their eyes or look away from irrelevant information. When using this strategy, older adults performed as well as younger adults
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6.2 - What are attentional resources? Under what conditions are age differences observed?
What is divided attention?
- Divided attention addresses the question of how much information can be processed at any given time
- Older adults are penalized when they must divide their attention between sources of information and/or responding
- How well do people perform multiple tasks simultaneously?
- Age differences are found on some divided -attention tasks and not others
- Part of the explanation involves task complexity and practice
- Age differences on divided-attention tasks can be minimuzed if older adults are given extensive practice in performing the task, reducing the demands on attention
6.2 - How do automatic and effortful processes differ? In what situations are age differences present?
- Automatic processing places minimal demands on attentional capacity
- Some automatic processes appear to be prewired and require no attentional capacity and do not benefit from practice
- Infomration that is processed automatically gets into the system largely without us being aware of it
- Effortful processing requires all of the available attentional capacity
- Most tasks involving deliberate memory, such as learning the words on a list require effortful processing
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6.2 - What are processing resources?
- With increasing age comes a decline in the amount of available attention one has to apply to a particular situation
- Declining processiing resources would account for poorer performance on attention tasks
6.3 - What are the 3 steps of memory processing that may reveal differences according to age?
1) Encoding - the process of getting information into the memory system
2) Storage - the manner in which information is presented and kept in memory
3) Retrieval - getting information back out of memory
- No evidence for age differences in how information is organized in storage
- Research looking at encoding and retrieval as sources of age differences
6.3 - What is working memory?
- How is information kept in mind for additional processing into long-term memory or held temporarily during retrieval?
- Individuals have a limited capacity for remembering information (about seven chunks of information) do older adults maintain this capacity?
- Short-term memory tasks measure the longest span of digits an individual can recall immediately after presentation. Small or no age differences have been recorded
- Working memory is an age-sensitive factor that affects long-term memory processing, for example, encoding information into long-term memory
- Working memory is the active processes and structures involved in holding information in mind and simultaneously using that information, sometimes in conjunction with incoming information, to solve a problem, make a decision, or learn new information
- Working memory has a relatively small capacity - like a juggler who can only keep a small number of items in the air simultaneously
- Deals with information being processed right at this moment and acts as a kind of mental scratchpad.
- Evidence indicates that there is greater age-related decline in working memory relative to passive short-term memory
- When the number of tasks to be performed increases, older adults’ lower storage capacity results in impaired working memory performance
- Ability to allocate capacity in working memory to more than one task declines with age.
- Loss of some of the ability to hold items in working memory may limit older adults’ overall cognitive functioning
- Depends on the type of information being used and may vary across different tasks
- Age-related decline in spatial working memory is greater than that in verbal working memory, although there is decline in both
- Older adults have no trouble accessing multiple pieces of information at one time - difficulty is in juggling all them
- Time of day affected the strength of age differences observed in working memory. Alertness is higher in the morning for older adults and in the evening for younger adults
6.3 - What is explicit memory?
- Intentional and conscious remembering of information that is learned and remembered at a specific point in time
- Aging impacts explicit and implicit memory differently
6.3 - What is implicit memory?
Sometimes called procedural memory
- Implicit memory involves retrieval of information without conscious or intentional recollection.
- Research shows that aging impacts these two forms of memory very differently.
- Implicit memory shows much smaller age differences than explicit memory
- The distinction between the explicit and the implicit memory needs to be taken into account when evaluating the degree to which performance on a particular task involves intentional (explicit) or nonintentional (implicit) memory retrieval
- Implicit memory is a facilitation or change in task performance that is attributable to having been exposed to information at some earlier point in time, but which does not involve active, explicit memory.
- A good example of implicit memory is a language task such as stem completion. In a stem completion task, you would be required to complete a word stem with the first word that comes to mind (for instance, con ). Previously, you may have been shown a list of words that contained a valid completion of the stem (such as contact). If you have seen valid completions of the stems, you are more likely to use them later to complete the stems than you are to make up a different one (such as contest).
- This facilitation is called priming
- The memory aspect of the task is that you remember the stem completion you were shown; the implicit part is remembering it without being told to do so.
6.3 - More of the differences between implicit and explicit memories
- Explicit memory performance is affected by having people think about the meaning of the items, implicit memory is not,
- People with amnesia show severe problems on explicit memory tests but often perform similarly to normal people on implicit memory tests
- Implicit memory may be an exception to the general finding of age-related decline in long-term memory for new information
- Age differences on implicit memory tests either are not there or are notably smaller than age effects on more explicit memory tasks
- When age differences appear, they favor younger adults, though the age difference is smaller than for explicit memory tests
6.3 - What are some of the differences that exist among different kinds of implicit memory tests?
- Important distinction between perceptually and conceptually based tests
- Perceptually based implicit memory tasks rely on processing the physical features of a stimulus; an example would be to process whether a word appears in lowercase or uppercase letters.
- Conceptually based implicit memory tasks rely on the semantic meaning of the items, such as whether the word is a verb.
- Depending on what people are asked to process (i.e., physical features or semantic meaning), performance on the tests differ
- The difference between the types of tests has important implications for age differences
- Older adults show greater conceptual priming whereas younger adults do not
- Overall evidence suggests equal age effects in the two types of priming
- What accounts for the sparing of implicit memory with age?
- There is differential age-related deterioration in the brain underlying more explicit forms of memory (e.g., frontal-striatal system) as opposed to those underlying implicit memory (e.g., cerebral neocortex)
- Behaviorally oriented researchers also point out that when age-related decline is evident in implicit memory tasks, it is probably because the tasks are contaminated with some explicit memory demands
6.3 - What is long-term memory?
- Remembering routines, performing on an exam, and remembering an appointment - these types of situations call for long-term memory
- The ability to remember rather extensive amounts of information from a few seconds to a few hours to decades.
- Represents a large-capacity store - information can be kept for long periods.
- Consists of distinct multiple systems that are functionally different and use different brain structures
6.3 - What are 2 types of long-term memory?
1) Semantic - concerns learning and remembering the meaning of words and concepts that are not tied to specific occurrences of events in time
- Examples - knowing the definitions of words in order to complete crossword puzzles, being able to translate this paragraph from English into French,
2) Episodic memory is the general class of memory having to do with the conscious recollection of information from a specific event or point in time.
- Examples - learning the material in this course so that you will be able to reproduce it on an examination in the future, remembering what you did on your summer vacation
6.3 - How are episodic and semantic memory impacted by aging?
- Episodic and semantic memory are impacted differently by aging
- Episodic memory stays fairly stable until around 55-60 and then shows a decline beginning around age 65
- Semantic memory increases from 35-55 years of age and then levels off - although semantic memory starts to decline at age 65, the decline is much less than for episodic memory
- Semantic memory is relatively spared with age in the absence of a disease state.
- Evidence suggests that there are no deficits in semantic memory processes such as language comprehension, the structure of knowledge, and the activation of general knowl- edge
(Light, 1996; Nyberg et al., 2003). Semantic memory retrieval typically does not tax working memory, and thus older adults can draw upon experience in word meanings and/or general world knowledge. In addition, whereas retrieval of epi- sodic memories is based on cues to the original experience, semantic memories are retrieved con- ceptually as part of our world knowledge. However, research also shows that although information in semantic memory is retained in older adults, some- times it is hard to access if it is not exercised on a
6.3 - What happens to semantic memory with age?
Semantic memory is relatively spared with age in the absence of a disease state.
6.3 - Are there deficits in some semantic memory processes?
There are no deficits in semantic memory processes such as language comprehension, the structure of knowledge, and the activation of general knowl- edge
6.3 - Does retrieval of semantic memory items tax working memory?
- Semantic memory retrieval typically does not tax working memory, and thus older adults can draw upon experience in word meanings and/or general world knowledge.
6.3 - Are semantic memories part of our general world knowledge? What is the role of exercising semantic memory?
- Semantic memories are part of our world knowledge
- Although information in semantic memory is retained in older adults, it can be hard to access if it is not exercised on a regular basis
6.3 - With respect to semantic memory, in what area can age-related decline be observed?
What are TOT experiences?
- Major area in which age-related decline in semantic memory can be observed is in its accessibility
- This is illustrated in word-finding deficits
- Older adults typically have more trouble retrieving a target word when presented with a definition of the word, and they tend to encounter more “tip-of- the-tongue” (TOT) experiences
- TOT problems indicate that even highly familiar information can become more difficult to retrieve as we grow older.
6.3 - What is episodic memory?
- Researchers study episodic memory by having people learn information, such as a list of words, and then asking them to recall or recognize the items.
- In a recall test, people are asked to remember information without hints or cues. Typical example would be a closed-book exam
6.3 - What is recognition?
- Recognition involves selecting previously learned informa- tion from among several items
- Everyday examples of recognition include taking multiple-choice tests and picking out the names of your high school friends from a complete list of your classmates.
6.3 - What is the difference in performance between younger and older adults on tests of episodic memory?
- Older adults perform worse than younger adults on tests of episodic memory recall in that they omit more information, include more intrusions, and repeat more previously recalled items
- These age differences are large; for example, more than 80% of a sample of adults in their 20s will do better than adults in their 70s
6.3 - How well do older adults use internal study strategies?
- Older adults tend to be less efficient at spontaneously using internal study strategies, such as using imagery or putting items into categories in one’s mind to organize information during study.
6.3 - How can differences in performance be improved upon in older adults?
- Age differences between older and younger adults can be reduced in several ways
1) Allowing older adults to practice or to perform a similar task before learning a new list improves performance - better memory performance after practice parallels similar improvements following practice on tests of skills related to fluid intelligence
2) Using material that is more familiar to older adults also improves their performance. For example, older adults do not remember words such as byte or Walkman as well as words such as jitterbug or bobbysox
3) Older adults may use compensatory strategies to help themselves remember
6.3 - Conclusions about episodic memory
- Older adults are apparently disadvantaged when left on their own to face relatively rapid-paced, disorganized information
- Memory performance appears to be somewhat flexible and can be manipulated, with improvements coming from a variety of sources
- Episodic memory process that is relatively spared with age: autobiographical memory.
6.3 - Characteristics of autobiological memory
- Information that needs to be kept for a very long time (from a few hours to many years) includes facts learned earlier, the meaning of words, past life experiences, etc.
- Involves remembering information and events from our own life - such recollections provide us with a personal history and define who we are.
- As important as autobiographical memory is, though, very few studies have looked at how well people remember things over the course of their lives.
- Autobiographical memory is primarily a form of episodic memory, although it can also involve semantic memory
- The episodic part of autobiographical memory is the conscious recollection of temporal and spatial events from one’s past.
- The semantic part consists of knowledge and facts of one’s past (e.g., personal characteristics, knowledge that an event occurred) without having to remember exactly when things occurred and in what order.
- The episodic details of autobiographical memory are more difficult for older adults, whereas the semantic aspects are much more easily remembered
- Older adults have been shown to be worse than younger adults in reporting vivid recollections of their past
- Older adults’ general memories of real-life events have been shown to contain more personal thoughts and feelings and have been rated more interesting than those of younger adults
6.3 - How can we assess the accuracy of long-term memory?
- Being able to verify what individuals remember accompanied by some record of true events is extremely important in evaluating our ability to remember over long periods of time. Only in cases where records have been kept for many years is this usually possible.
- At age 50, participants completed a lengthy questionnaire about these their health in childhood, and their responses were compared with similar reports made 10 and 20 years earlier, as well as with the official records. Coleman and colleagues found amazing accuracy for information such as whether a person had ever been a smoker or had a particular disease such as chicken pox.
- Half of the memories elicited at age 50 were more accurate than the memories for the same information elicited 10 years earlier at age 40
6.3 - What distinguishes events that are memorable from those that are not?
What makes a moment that we will remember for the rest of our lives?
- Many people think that highly traumatic events are ones that are indelibly etched in our memories.
- If so, then peo- ple who survived Nazi concentration camps should have vivid memories of their experiences.
- Wagenaar and Groeneweg (1990) examined the testimony of 78 survivors of Camp Erika, a Nazi concentration camp in The Netherlands during World War II. Dutch police initially interviewed the survivors about their experiences between 1943 and 1948. In 1984, during a war crimes trial for an accused Nazi collaborator, these witnesses gave sworn depositions about their experiences at Camp Erika. The camp survivors’ recollections were a mix of accurate and inaccurate information. In many cases memory was quite good; even 40 years later about half of the survivors remembered the exact date of their arrival at the camp and their entire identification number. They were able to recall the general conditions of the camp, overall treatment, and the like. However, they also had forgotten many important details, including in some cases their own brutal treatment.
- Wagenaar and Groeneweg point out that these forgotten details mean that even extreme trauma is no guarantee that an event will be remembered. Perhaps forgetting the horrors of being brutalized is even a type of self-protection.
6.3 - Do events have to be traumatic to be highly memorable?
- No, some historical events that have considerable personal relevance, very unusual or novel events, and other events that are highly emotional are also remembered very well.
- Such memories are called flashbulb memories because they are so vivid that it seems as if we have a photograph of the event
- The September 11, 2001, terrorist attack is an example … everyone can remember where they were and what they were doing
- Flash bulb memories may also involve personal autobiographical events. Such events tend to impress into memory the circumstances in which the person first heard the news about the event; memories of the circumstances include information about the place, other people present at the time, what activities were occurring, the source of the information, and even associated smell
- An interesting phenomenon arises when you examine vivid autobiographical events across indi- viduals’ life spans.
- It is important at what age the vivid event takes place - for both younger and older adults, vivid memories experienced earlier in life (between 10 and 30 years of age) are reported more often than those occurring during middle adulthood (between 30 and 50 years of age
- For older adults, the bump in memory was most evident for happiest memories. In contrast, very sad memories showed a decline in recall. It may be that this earlier period of life has importance in defining oneself and thus helps to organize personal memo- ries, but that emotionally negative events are not included as importance is determined
6.3 - Concept Check Questions:
1) Why is working memory important in understanding age differences in performance?
2) What major differences are there between older and younger adults’ working memory?
3) What are the age-related differences between implicit and explicit memory?
4) What accounts for the fact that implicit memory is spared with aging?
5) How do age differences in episodic and semantic memory compare?
6) What differences have been observed between older and younger adults in aspects of autobiographical memory?
6.4 - Factors Affecting Age Differences in Memory - Learning Objectives
1) What evidence is there for age differences in encoding?
2) What age differences have been observed in retrieval?
3) What are the relative contributions of encoding and retrieval in explaining age differences in performance?
4) How does a neuroscience perspective help us understand these contributions?
5) How does automatic retrieval affect age differences in memory?
6) What age differences have been observed in processing misinformation as true?
6.4 - What is elaborate rehearsal?
What is intentional learning?
What is incidental learning?
- Results from years of research suggest an age-related decrement in encoding processes. An example of an encoding process that affects memory is elaborative rehearsal.
- Elaborative rehearsal involves making connections between incoming information and information already known. For example, a person presented with the word emu and told that this is a bird that does not fly may try to think of other flightless birds. With some thought, ostrich may come to mind. Linking emu and ostrich would be an example of this type of rehearsal.
- Research in support of an age-related decrement in elaborative rehearsal finds that older adults have more difficulty making such connections than younger adults do
- Once these connections have been made, older and younger adults maintain them equivalently (which supports the conclusion that whereas encoding differences exist, storage differences do not).
- Encoding processes involve intentional learning of information. However, what happens when information is learned and there are no expectations of testing this memory later on (e.g., when a person witnesses a crime)? This latter type of memory processing is sometimes called incidental learning.
- For example, a study compared incidental and intentional learning of names in younger and older adults. Their instructions for encoding the names varied from stating the first letter of the name to defining the name to simply trying to remember the name for a later test. Younger adults tended to out- perform older adults for intentionally learned names, but older adults did as well as younger adults whenever they encoded the information incidentally (e.g., remembering the first letter or defining the name).
6.4 - Why are there age differences in performance in intentional versus incidental encoding?
Why do these age differences in intentional versus incidental encoding occur? Anderson and col- leagues conclude that attentional resources are consumed to a greater extent during intentional encoding.
- If you were asked to study material that you would be tested on, while at the same time you had to tune out a conversation going on in the same room, you would place a lot of effort into using strategies to effectively focus on the information to be studied. However, while you were studying the materials, if you were told that the conversation in the room was about you, you would probably extend more effort to listening to the conversation. You would perform better on the test in the first case than in the second case. Attentional control would be necessary while you encoded the information to succeed on the test. Distracting conversation would not hurt you when you were able to focus your attention more exclusively on the test.
6.4 - How do we cope when faced with large amounts of material that has to be remembered?
- One important aspect of attentional control and expending attentional resources is that when we are confronted with large amounts of information that we need to remember, we tend to use various techniques, called strategies that make the task easier and increase the effi ciency of storage.
6.4 - What are 2 effective strategies for learning new information?
- Do older adults behave strategically when studying information to be remembered?
- Two strategies for learning new information are
1) Organizing it
2) Establishing links to help you remember - Older adults do not spontaneously use such encoding strategies in comparison to younger adults
- Older adults are less likely to take advantage of similarities in meaning among words (such as the link between river and lake) presented randomly in a list as a way to organize the items. Because the number of items remembered from such a list is highly related to the use of organization, younger adults outperform older adults on such tasks.
- Spontaneous production of effective strategies is not a sufficient account of age differences in memory performance
- Only 35% of older adults compared to 49% of younger adults used optimal strategies for encoding (e.g., placing related items into meaningful catego- ries)
- There were large age differences in recall regardless of strategy methods used. Strategy production had a very modest effect on age differences in recall.
- Large age differences in recall remained even when older adults were instructed to use effective strategies. However, producing a strategy does not necessarily imply that the strategy was used effectively.
6.4 - What is retrieval and how do we use it?
- Age-related differences on explicit memory tasks are affected by the degree to which a task employs retrieval cues.
- It has been long known that age differences are more pronounced on free-recall tests which provide no cues to individuals
- For recognition tests, the original target to be learned is presented as a cue and fewer age differences are found
- Older adults show more tip-of-the-tongue states and feeling-of-knowing (feeling you know something yet you are not sure what it is) after failure to retrieve information
- This may be due to temporary inaccessibility.
- Older adults are as likely as younger adults to recognize the material they cannot recall when in the TOT state.
6.4 - Do older adults have difficulties performing tasks that do not have a high level of environmental support?
- Age differences in memory where there are limited cues (e.g., free recall) may be a function of limited self-initiated operations in older adults.
- When you are recognizing a previous piece of information, the fact that the target is in front of you creates a high level of environmental support.
- A free-recall task demands that you access that information with limited help and cues from the environment.
- Memory functioning in the aging adult is influenced by deficits in both encoding and retrieval -
6.4 - What can cognitive neuroscience tell us about age differences in retrieving information?
- Cognitive neuroscience also presents evidence suggesting age differences in encoding and retrieval
- Using PET scans, Grady found that both younger and older age groups showed similar patterns of increased blood flow in specific areas of the brain during recognition, but differed significantly during encoding.
- Compared with older adults, younger adults showed significantly greater increases in blood flow to the left prefrontal and temporal areas of the brain. (Recall that this is called lateralization to a specific hemisphere or asymmetry.)
- Grady interpreted these differences as evidence that age-related memory differences may be due to older adults’ failure to encode information adequately.
- Inadequate encoding could result in information not getting into memory at all, or not being as elaborately encoded, making retrieval more diffi cult at best.
- fMRI studies have found that age-related reductions in frontal-lobe activation are associated with reduced ability in encoding words in memory
- The hippocampal region has been related to current memory functioning as well as predicting the rate of further memory decline over time
6.4 - How do older adults try to compensate for failing memory performance?
- Prefrontal activity during memory performance is less lateralized (activity found more equally in both brain hemispheres instead of localized in one hemisphere) in older adults than in younger adults. - Lateralization (found in young adults) leads to more effective processing of information
- Perhaps those older adults who show strong bilateralization (i.e., activity in both hemispheres) when processing information also show enhanced cognitive performance relative to older adults who show less bilateralization and less lateralization.
- Additional activity across many brain regions that occurs when older adults process information may enhance performance on the specific task investigated.
6.4 - Give 3 reasons why the research on encoding and retrieval processes is important
1) It emphasizes that age-related decrements in memory are complex; they are not due to changes in a single process.
2) Intervention or training programs must consider both encoding and retrieval. Training people to use encoding strategies without also training them how to use retrieval strategies will not work. To the extent that only partial information is encoded, retrieval strategies need to focus on helping people find whatever aspects are available.
3) Theories of how memory changes with age must take individual differences into account, especially differential rates of change in component pro- cesses and lateralization.
6.4 - What is the false-fame effect?
What is the process-dissociation paradigm?
- Memory situations involve both automatic and deliberate retrieval processes
- Process-dissociation paradigm is used to sepa- rate out the different contributions of each of these two types of processes in a memory task.
- False-fame studies - older and younger adults were asked to first read a list of nonfamous names. Then they were given a new list consisting of three types of names: names from the first list, additional new nonfamous names, and moderately famous names. Participants were asked to indicate which of the names presented were famous. They were also told that the names on the original list were nonfamous. If they were to recognize any names from that list, they should exclude them from further consideration.
- The false-fame effect results when a previously observed nonfamous name (on the original list) is mistakenly identified as a famous name at testing.
- Studying the original nonfamous names increases their familiarity, so when people see this name again and they do not consciously recollect that it was on the original list, they will produce the false-fame effect found that older adults produced a larger false-fame effect than young adults did.
- In a subsequent study, adults were told that the names from the original list were actually obscure famous names, so if one looked familiar at testing, it would be appropriate to label it as famous whether or not they consciously recollected it. The first experiment assessed how con- scious recollection affects memory, and the second study assessed how familiarity affects memory. Overall, the assessment of conscious recollection was lower for older adults than for younger adults, but the assessment for automatic retrieval (in this case familiarity testing) in the second study did not differ across age groups. Thus, although conscious recollection is impaired as suggested earlier in this chapter; automatic retrieval of familiar information is spared. Jacoby and colleagues suggest that dif- ficulties in recollection on the part of older adults are largely a function of an inability during retrieval to access the details of an episode and may account for situations where older adults display memory problems. This idea relates back to our distinction between implicit and explicit memory as well as episodic and semantic memory. Both implicit and semantic memory tasks do not require such detailed conscious recollection of information; therefore, researchers have not seen poor performance on the part of older adults in these areas.
The fact that older adults exhibit the false-fame effect to a greater degree than younger adults suggests that although familiarity is intact, conscious recollection is not, thus allowing familiarity to misinform the older adult’s performance.
