week 2 Flashcards
Scaffolding theory
Compensatory scaffolding helps to reduce or delay cognitive impairment
The revised model includes life course factors with both positive and negative influences
Bottom up refers to what
stimulus-driven behaviour, automatic attention
top down refers to what?
goal driven, goal driven, based on previous experience and knowledge, controlled attention
Explain the research on bottom up vs top down effects in aging
The experiment involved looking at alike stimuli. bottom-up scenario- told to look at green stimuli in a bookcase. top-down- told to look at a specific green object in a book case with the same object but different colours.
what were the results of this setting.
older adults could easily complete bottom up, but could not as easily do top-down. Attention is the influence at play, showing that older people could not control their attention as well as younger people
older adults perform as well as younger adults in primarily bottom up tasks. when is this not the case
age differences become more prominent in high demanding tasks
in high demand tasks older adults are faced with two impairments
Age-related decline in their brain structure and function
Having to allocate more top-down processing resources to compensate for the decline in bottom-up sensory input
Ineffective compensation: older adults show decline in their performance even though they to maintain their performance by increasing their blank-blank control
top down
results indicate that increased attention effort to compensate is
in effective
effective compensation: older adults use more effort than younger people. Why is this
They are faster but less accurate
What is the information degradation hypothesis?
degraded sensory input–> increases cognitive demand–> decline in cognitive performance
Controlling for age differences in sensory processing can blank age related differences but it depends on the task
eliminate
doing brain scans what was found in the brains of older people compared to younger people when doing a task?
more activation in frontal region than younger adults
Example of creating research that eliminates age differences
Simple visual search task: reducing contrast sensitivity equally impaired performance of younger and older adults
Example of creating research that dosent eliminates age differences
Complex higher-order visual task: older adults show great impairment
compensation with a cost: What influences older people to make them need to compensate
Older adults tend to be more influenced by external informational and past experiences in a more automatic way
compensation with a cost: what is the taxing issue
the tax that compensation for less salient/noisy bottom up processes impose on available resources for top-down attention during complex tasks
Crunch model-related utilization of neural circuits hypothesis
Activation continues until demands excel in the ability to compensate and then we see a decline.
since top down attention is goal driven, research with must consider what factors
age difference in goals and not just abilities
do older people preferentially attend to what emotions
positive
older adults paying less attention to negative information leads them to two things
less likely affected by loses, less likely to react to negative incentives
what are 3 methodological issues in old people research
In lab results are inconsistent with real-world findings where older adults are influenced greatly by negative information
Research participants are already more motivated than general population
Most tasks are based on monetary incentives
How do negative age sterotypes affect older peoples performance
Older adults are not immune to all negative information…
Significantly affected by negative information that concerns age-related stereotypes
how can old people research be affected by attention
There is a limit to everyone’s attentional capacity.
Explain intentional blindess and give an example
Failure to notice objects or events when attention is directed elsewhere: gorilla basketball video
Driiving and inattentional blindess study. Explain it
People of different ages will do a difficult driving simulation. on the side of the road, there is people sometimes. drivers often didn’t notice the people on the sidewalk
what things are less likely to be missed during inattentional blindness
lower rate for animate
Speed of processing is often measured in 3 ways
Time to complete a task\ Letter comparison (match sequence of letters)
Time to respond to stimulus (reaction time)
Number of items correctly completed in an allotted time ( trails a and trails b)
age related effect for each task is not unique to that task, instead…
its a shared amoung multiple tasks
how does practice affect results
with more practice and experience people get faster
This is the case for all ages
Health status affect on results
healthier individuals shower faster processing than less healthy people
Effects are small and there is no interaction with age
What is a task characteristic
slowing depends on the task older people are slower in spatial task than verbal tasks
What occurs in arithmetic tasks with older and younger people
performance is similar but older people react slower than younger people
Slower processing speed contributes to some of the age related differences found in other cognitive variables such as:
Memory
Spatial abilities
Reasoning
Language
slow processing speed affects driving and is one of the predictors of
driving cessation
In people with MCI and early Alzheimer’s, slow processing speed has shown association with
driving, financial ability and other activities of daily living
what is a good test for predicting driving and behaviour
Useful field of view test
UFOV is a good test for predicting driving and behavior, the outcomes include measures of processing speed and attention
