Eugene A. Lovelace

Healthy older adults’ perceptions of their memory functioning and use of mnemonics

Interview data were gathered from a purposive sample of 40 healthy, articulate older adults (54 to 85 years old, median = 68 years) concerning the events causing memory problems in their everyday activities, the extent to which they felt they had experienced any change in memory as they grew older, and the sorts of memory aids they employed. The examples of forgetting they provided included both retrospective memory failures (the most common and most irritating being the inability to recall someone’s name) and prospective memory failures (e.g., forgetting to get or do a certain thing while out shopping). For each specific type of memory failure, the modal response was of no change with aging, yet 70% of participants reported an increase in memory failure for one or more items. The memory aids most widely reported involved external mnemonics such as writing notes and placing things in conspicuous places so as not to forget them. The pattern of use of mnemonics parallels other data in the literature for younger adults.

6 Aging and Metacognitions Concerning Memory Function

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the aging and metacognitions concerning memory function. The term metacognition is generally taken to refer to an individuals cognition about cognition, what the person knows of cognitive processes employed in the encoding, storage, retrieval and use of information. This chapter presents some recent work addressing the general question of whether there are age-related changes in these metacognitive processes in late adulthood. The literature on metacognition and aging deals predominantly with metamemory, one‘s beliefs and knowledge about one‘s memory functioning. As originally conceived metamemory centered on knowledge about memory, e.g., knowledge about the memory demands of particular tasks and knowledge of the strategies appropriate to particular tasks. In current use metamemory is commonly taken to include memory beliefs or the notion of one‘s self-efficacy with respect to memory functioning.

Attributes that come to mind in the TOT state

This study explored the sorts of attributes that college students were able to report when in the tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state. Forty-five questions were posed; the answers sought were mostly names of famous people or characters in famous literary works. When students believed an answer they provided was wrong but believed that they would recognize the to-be-recalled item if they saw it, they were asked to provide any information they could about the answer. They then received a four-alternative, forced-choice recognition test. In addition to such structural attributes as word length, letters in the target name, and phonemic features, the students often reported frequency of occurrence of the word and such semantic attributes as country or language associated with the name, descriptive attributes, and context or situational attributes. The TOT states were predictive of superior recognition, but the number and types of attributes reported did not appear to be systematically related to recognition success.

Vision, kinesthesis, and control of hand movement by young and old adults.

This study examined the accuracy with which 20 young (18 to 24 yr.) and 32 old (55 to 85 yr.) adults were able to move their hands when not allowed to guide them visually. They tried to touch a target spot given either visually or kinesthetically, under conditions in which the target either remained present during the response or was discontinued prior to the response. They also tried to touch points on the face with eyes closed and wrote their names and common words with and without visual input. While there was slight evidence of age-related decline in accuracy of moving the hand to a target location in some conditions, older adults appear to use kinesthetic cues to the target location as effectively as visual cues. The absence of age effects on touching the face or writing with the eyes closed suggests that the kinesthetic and motor control systems are relatively well preserved in healthy older adults.

On using norms for low-frequency words

When norms are used to select words of various frequency of occurrence in the language, great care must be exercised in the selection of low-frequency words. The stability of estimates of frequency for rare words hinges heavily on the size of the corpus on which the word count is based, and on whether the frequency index takes into account the distribution across samples making up the corpus. Although some frequency norms directly provide an index that takes dispersion into account (The American Heritage Word Frequency Book), others do not (e.g., Kucera & Francis, 1967). Researchers predominantly use the Kucera and Francis norms, and they routinely take the total frequency of occurrence in the corpus as their frequency index, with no correction for dispersion.

Aging and word finding: Reverse vocabulary and Cloze tests

Two tasks were used to evaluate age differences in “word-finding difficulty, ”—lexical access and retrieval—for 31 young adults (college students) and 24 healthy, community-dwelling older adults (aged 58 to 86). Comparison of performances on a traditional (forward) and a reverse vocabulary test for the same set of 43 nouns indicated that the aged could define the words as well as or better than the young, but that they had greater difficulty thinking of the word when given the definition. A Cloze task, in which 32 nouns had been deleted from each of four prose passages, required that participants try to guess the deleted words. On this task, the performances of young and old adults were very similar. The only suggestion of greater word-finding difficulty for the aged was that they more often failed to provide any response, although in absolute terms these omission errors were quite rare for both age groups.

The role of vision in sound localization

Three experiments examined the role of vision in locating a brief sound (2-sec. speech noise) from an unseen source in the horizontal left front quadrant. The head could be freely moved. Subjects could point to the sound location more accurately with eyes open. However, since in a second study the accuracy of pointing a finger was poorer than for aiming ones eyes at the sound, the effect in the first study may reflect using vision to calibrate the hand location. A third study showed no difference in accuracy of aiming ones eyes at a sound when eyes were open versus closed during presentation of sound. More accurate auditory localization with eyes open than closed was not supported.

15 Cognitive Aging: A Summary Overview

Publisher Summary This chapter provides an overview of cognitive aging. It deals with three facets of cognitive aging. One is an attempt to understand underlying cognitive processes, and to discover the ways in which these processes show age-related change, both quantitative and qualitative. A second facet concerns the impact of other traits of the individual on cognitive functioning. These include personality, beliefs, self-evaluation, self-knowledge and conscious awareness of these processes in the monitoring of cognitive activities. The third involves exploration of some possibilities for effective interventions that will permit an improvement of cognitive functioning for older adults, and perhaps at least delay, if not prevent, cognitive decline with aging. The theoretical framework for current research efforts in cognitive aging is a mixture of concepts from revised versions of the modal multistore models and from associative network models.

1 Basic Concepts in Cognition and Aging

Publisher Summary This chapter presents the basic concepts in cognition and aging. For a broad range of cognitive skills the authors explore the evidence for age-related changes in functioning, and provide some ideas about remediation in some cases where there is evidence of cognitive decline. The present chapter sets the stage for those explorations by providing some historical context and a cursory overview of basic theoretical concepts and models of cognitive functioning, as well as some of the major issues in aging research. While the primary audience of this volume is those scholars working in the area of cognitive aging, the readership is assumed to extend beyond that group. With the intent of making the book accessible to that wider audience, this introductory chapter provides basic concepts in cognition and aging. This chapter provides a conceptual framework and research methodologies which underlie the material. The information processing framework has borrowed heavily from the terminology and concepts of the rapidly developing computer technology for the storage and processing of information. The processes by which people take in information and make an internal record of it are commonly called encoding and storage processes.

Judging age from handwriting done with and without visual feedback

In a prior study (Lovelace & Aikens, 1990), young and old adults wrote 10 common words with their eyes open and again with their eyes closed. The present study used writing samples from 20 old and 20 young writers (67–85 years vs. 18–24 years) in the prior study. Thirty college students judged (1) which were written with eyes closed (paired comparisons, same word written by same person) and (2) whether the writer was young or old. Both tasks were difficult; performance was significantly above chance, but not good (71% correct on open/closed, 65% on young/old, both ps <.001). Accuracy of open/closed decisions was no higher when judging old writers than young writers, implying that the motor skill of handwriting is well preserved in aged individuals; they do not have an increased need of visual feedback to write. Judges also reported cues they had used to make these decisions. Accuracy of age decisions was significantly related to the reported use of style cues (73%correct for subjects reporting they used that cue vs. 53% when not reported, chance = 50%).