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Alzheimer's, Dementia & Mental Health
Aging Adults Have Choices in Confronting Perceived
Mental Decline
Minor glitches in cognitive system can loom larger
than needed
 Aug. 8, 2007 - Aging adults may joke about memory
lapses and “early Alzheimer’s.” They may worry when they can’t
understand a drug plan or lose track of the characters in a novel. But they have more control over their “cognitive
vitality” than they may realize, says Elizabeth Stine-Morrow, a
professor of
educational psychology at the University of Illinois, who has spent
20 years studying learning throughout the lifespan.
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Aging adults have choices in the way they allocate
effort in everyday mental tasks like reading, Stine-Morrow said. They
can compensate for subtle age-related changes rather than either giving
in to them or giving up completely on the activity, she said.
They also have choices in the way they stay
mentally engaged and embrace challenges throughout their lifetimes and
into older age.
It’s all part of what she has playfully named the
“Dumbledore hypothesis of cognitive aging,” based on a line from the
headmaster Dumbledore in the third Harry Potter novel: “It is our
choices … that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
Certain “fluid abilities,” or “mental mechanics,”
do tend to decline with age, Stine-Morrow said, but it matters how we
respond. “Minor glitches in the cognitive system can loom larger than
they perhaps need to because we’ve got these preconceived ideas about
what happens with aging,” she said.
She will discuss her “Dumbledore hypothesis” on
Aug. 19 at the American Psychological Association conference in San
Francisco, in a presidential address for the Adult Development and Aging
division. A paper on the subject has been accepted for publication in
the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.
In her reading research, Stine-Morrow, also a
professor in Illinois’
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, has paid
particular attention to changes we make – or fail to make – in the way
we process and regulate our reading as we age.
More recently, she has initiated a program called
Senior Odyssey, designed to engage older adults in team-based creative
problem-solving and other brain-teasing challenges. After a pilot study,
she is now at the start of a five-year, $2.8 million grant from the
National Institute on Aging to develop the program and study its
effectiveness.
Much of her reading research has involved measuring
small split-second differences in the way people move through text, and
in how and where they pause, noting how those differences affect what
they gain or remember from the text.
She has found that older adults who remember more
of what they’ve read tend to read differently from either younger
readers or older readers who remember less. They had learned,
consciously or unconsciously, that “in order to maintain the same level
of comprehension and memory for text as you get older, you have to do it
differently,” she said.
One thing they do is to spend more time building a
“situation model” at the beginning of a story or book. They take time to
get a feel for the setting, to get to know the characters, and to get
grounded in important details of the story. By doing so, they find it
easier to integrate new information later on, Stine-Morrow said.
“Page-turners are page-turners later (in a book or story); they’re
rarely page-turners early on.”
Older readers with good comprehension also spend
more time at what Stine-Morrow calls the “micro level” of their reading,
pausing longer and more often to integrate new concepts or to orient
themselves to a change of setting in the text.
“Younger adults who have a better memory (of what
they’ve read) spend more time doing that conceptual integration, or what
we call ‘wrap-up,’ at the ends of sentences, whereas older adults tend
to do that more in the middle of sentences,” she said.
In both cases, older readers with good
comprehension have learned how to adjust their allocation of effort to
compensate for losses in areas such as working memory and
language-processing speed. Current research, yet to be published, is
looking at how readers respond when they are coached on using these
strategies.
“Effort is a good thing; effort doesn’t mean you’re
deficient,” Stine-Morrow said. “It’s just the nature of cognition that
it requires effort. Every time you allocate effort, it increases your
capacity to do that thing in the future. And that becomes even more
important as we get older.”
Aging adults can find themselves “embedded in
cultural expectations about aging,” Stine-Morrow said. “They buy into
cultural stereotypes of diminished cognitive capacity.”
Drawing on another reference from Harry Potter,
Stine-Morrow compares those cultural expectations to the “sorting hat”
that Harry dons to select which house he will live in at the Hogwarts
school. The hat tries to convince him of one choice, but Harry insists
on another.
In Stine-Morrow’s analogy, the “sorting hat of
cultural expectations” suggests to aging adults that their abilities are
in decline. If they listen, they may shy away from intellectual
challenges, and in the process possibly hasten a real decline.
“Fundamentally, it’s a choice,” she said. “We make
the choice to listen to those murmurings of the sorting hat, or not.”
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