Memory performance among older adults is self-deterministic
A stereotype among older adults is that they have weaker memory and tend to be forgetful. A recent research aimed to assess and investigate how such negative stereotypes affect the memory performance of adults.
Published online in the Association for Psychological Science last October 26, the study showed how such stereotypes influence the memory errors and memory performance among seniors. The researchers were Ayanna Thomas (the director of the Cognitive Aging and Memory Lab and an assistant professor of psychology at Tufts University) and Stacey Dubois, a former graduate student.
In the first phase of their study, older adults and younger adults were shown a list of semantically related words. For example, the participants were presented with words that were related to “sleep”, such as “tired”, “night”, “bed”, and “rest”. However, the word “sleep” itself does not appear in the list.
When the participants, both the younger and older ones, were asked to recall the words, both groups recalled the word “sleep”, despite the fact that it didn’t appear in the list. It was also noted by the researchers that the older adults were more prone to falsely recall the word than younger adults were.
The theory behind the research is that older adults may believe that their impaired memory is caused by their age. Thomas and Dubois then set out to reduce this minds among older adults themselves.
In testing the theory, one group of participants that had both younger and older adults were told that they were to identify the same set of words previously presented. They were told that the test is more language-based, without emphasizing the memory part. Another group of participants comprising both younger and older adults were subject to the same test, but were told that older adults tend to do more poorly when it comes to memory tests than younger adults do.
The study showed than older adults who were told that the test is language-based and that they would perform as well as younger adults when recalling words were less likely to commit memory errors than older adults who were told beforehand that they would perform more poorly than younger adults.
The study shows how the biological and psychological effects of aging intertwine and affect cognitive deficits. It seems that the first step to memory improvement among older adults is for them to stop thinking that their age has anything to do with their memory.
