| Check Your Score | Review and Exam Info |

Sociology 120
Introduction to Gerontology

Transcript - Lesson 5

Learning Memory and Speed of Behavior

Learning

It's interesting how often the topic of memory comes up in discussions of aging and how self-conscious older people are about their memories, and now they develop almost a phobia of Alzheimer's disease. Uh..."I forgot my keys" or "I forgot the book" or "I left the milk out. I'm getting Alzheimer's disease." I will say this. My brain has practically ossified. I really think so. I can't remember anything. It's old age. My brain is...vanishing.

The most pervasive beliefs about aging include the idea that learning ability declines with age, that older people are forgetful, and that everything slows down as we grow older. Are these beliefs fact or fiction? How can we make the most of mental abilities as we grow older? Next on growing old in a new age. Much of human intellectual functioning is based on the ability to actively acquire new knowledge. For many adults, learning takes on a new meaning in old age. I did a study on mentally healthy older people. I was interviewing an 80-year-old woman who told me that she finally, for the first time, had an opportunity to read historical novels. She'd read 18 in the past 7 months. She asked me how many I had read. I told her to ask the next question. [woman] well, I think the fact that we still can learn has been very important. I sort of knew that, but you're always told you can't, that you're just really, uh, running down, and that probably could happen. I think it has a great deal to do with your health. But i've done... You know, i've gone back to classes and read a lot of heavier material than I used to. In my older years i've done this, and that all shows that you can learn. And this...this has reinforced that idea. When I went back to school, you know, I was carrying a full load. I went back full-time, and it wasn't easy. Um...I had to do a lot of reading and studying, and many things were very foreign to me, but, you know, I persevered and, um... And I remembered that when I graduated from, um... From...north shore community college, my whole family came to the graduation, and my husband was sitting in the audience, and, uh...someone said, "oh, is that your daughter that's graduating?" they saw mary franggos. And he was very proud to say, "no, that's my wife." right? I did say that. Everyone in my family has a degree except me, and I bring the bacon home.

Learning often takes place outside of traditional classroom settings. Senior centers across the country offer new settings for education. Courses run the gamut from writing and philosophy to quilting and the history of jazz. ...providing chordal accompaniment. Oliver Francisco had formal education in his earlier years. More recently, his learning has become introspective. I think my learning has become more, um... Uh... Focused on, uh...happenings, on people, on things that happened to me rather than looking so much, uh... Towards books, classes, and that has been-- that has been exciting to learn out of my everyday experiences.

Why is learning important for older adults? [woman] there is the notion-- I hear it more from men, but I think it will become more common with women as they have regular work lives throughout their lives-- the notion that one is entitled to retire. Retirement means not only that you don't have to work, but you can retire mentally. You don't have to remember phone numbers or keep a calendar anymore. You don't have to do anything intellectually challenging. Yeah, you do have the right to retire, but it will cost all of us. So that if retirement means becoming a mental couch potato as well as a physical couch potato, there really will be costs. Just like in physical exercise, you got to keep going.

There is a growing body of literature that has focused on the influence of an enriched environment on the health of brain cells of higher intellectual functioning. Now, brain cells communicate with one another in two ways. One, anatomically, by different projections, sort of like a tree and its branches. So it would be similar to two trees communicating via branches in close contact and then the release of neurochemicals. What laboratory research with animals has shown-- that enriched and challenging environments results in a growth of these extensions from the different brain cells. So it increases the number of extensions between brain cells, thereby improving the communication between these neurons or nerve cells of higher intellectual functioning. And the very exciting thing from an aging perspective is that this phenomenon continues with aging, and it's the first laboratory illustration of sort of long-term folk advice about "use it or lose it," where the brain, in its own way, is somewhat analogous to the muscle in the sense that intellectual exercise has a very positive effect. That's very critical from a health-promotion standpoint and very exciting in terms of the opportunities for aging people to stay active.

Oh, I think it got better. I really think my thinking and my...understanding is sharper than it was when I was younger, 'cause I always liked to read, but I do more now, and I do more thinking of different things, and... With the crossword puzzles. But I do love to read. I read anything and everything-- medical, otherwise. It doesn't make any difference. Doesn't have to be a book. It can be in a magazine, but I do. Like, I get my evening paper every night. I read it from top to bottom. So, I got to keep up with things. I have to know what's going on.

Is learning more difficult for older adults? Older people may believe they're not as good at learning tasks as when they were younger, but research indicates that learning ability is well-preserved in later years and may actually improve with age, particularly when accumulating knowledge in special interest areas. An older adult's ability to learn can be affected by several things. One of the first things one needs to be aware of are sensory changes with aging and how that may affect learning ability. Um...beginning in the 60's but particularly evident by the 70's are changes in vision and hearing, changes sufficient to affect learning, um.... In a more formal situation. Things like glare. For example, a brightly lit room or a table top that reflects light can be very difficult for an older adult. Uh...size of print becomes very important. It needs to be enlarged. But many of the computer types really are not very, um... The best for an older adult. One of the things we need when we tra-- when we read is we--we need serifs or footers on letters to help us guide our eye across the page.

Pacing of information is very important with an older adult. It's due to several things. First, it's due to sensory impairment in that if you're talking very rapidly, they may be more likely to miss information because of hearing loss. Or it may be that, due to memory problems, if you present information quickly, they can't process what you just said before you go on to new information. So pacing is very important.

Presenting information in multiple modalities is very important. Having an outline of the material to be presented in printed form as well as orally presenting material is important. But there must be a match between what's presented.

What kinds of activities are of greatest value intellectually? It needs to be activities that are interesting and meaningful but also are slightly novel. For example, if one is playing bridge or scrabble, one is always drawing a new hand or a new set of letters, and so the activity is never exactly the same even though it's the same game with the same rules. One has to continually engage in the activity. And so it's no need for me to say, "everybody has to do crossword puzzles," because one needs to choose activities that are, um... Interesting and meaningful and that one will sustain in one's, um...daily life. I watch jeopardy!, and I hate to say this, but these people are very intelligent. I can answer questions just as good as they can. My score wouldn't be that high, but I can do it.

The franggos maintain and develop their mental abilities by machine and by brain power. Well, I think, speaking for myself, i've found that I was threatened by the computer. I thought, "good lord, I'm not going to be able to use this--this computer." but like I said, um... You have to have an open mind. And, uh...and once I sat down and I started playing with it, I found it wasn't all that bad. So...maybe other people just don't even try. They feel that it's too complicated or that it doesn't affect them, that they're not ever going to use it, so they don't want to learn how to use it.

John and Mary franggos own a small store. John didn't feel the need to learn the computer, but not because he's not capable. [mary franggos] john has a wonderful mind. He can read something and retain it. He can recite, uh... Things that he learned in--in grade school. He really does. He's got a wonderful mind.

Jane potter sought new challenges in a formal classroom setting. I think I was probably, um...52. Um...and I graduated from salem state when I was 56. I started Harvard when I was 57 and graduated when I was 58. [laughing] thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience, I might say. When I went to Harvard, I found many, many challenges there. The...the quality of the questions that they asked required an awful lot of research. You had to do research in order to do research. [laughing] so I went to the professor, and I said, I said, "dr. Pierce, "could you tell me... "how I'm ever going to find out about this particular question you've asked?" I mean, I have no knowledge, no experience. There were no textbooks assigned to the course. The lectures were entirely different from the questions that he wanted answered in the papers. And he said very seriously, he said, "mrs. Potter, I think it would be a good idea "if you went to the library. "here at Harvard, "we have one of the best libraries in the world. "if you walk up the steps and go in, I'm sure your answers will be there." and I walked up the steps of the library, and I went in, and fortunately, there was a lovely librarian right there ready to help me. And once I got in there and asked questions about where to find this and that, people were very willing to help.

Jane potter has advice for others returning to school. Well, for anyone returning to school... In their later years, I would recommend that they start with a community college where there are no entrance exams or they would start with a night course just so that they can get into the feel of what it is to sit in class and what it is to... Learn to do research. Once that's taken care of, it comes much more easily. But the fact that you can... Go to a community college, sit in class, and pass is a pat on the back right there. Then you can start with the next course. Don't take four or five courses at once. Start with one course one semester, and go on from there. It is--you just feel so good inside, and I had the sense of accomplishment. And, um...and even though I was older, the kids accepted me, too, and they were very helpful. It was such a positive experience. One successful learning experience opens the door to other accomplishments.

I had not had a high-school education. I had grown up in Ireland, and my requirement had finished at 14. My husband and I at one point determined I had probably reached the 10th grade. I helped the children with their homework, and at some point I thought, "i'll try for a high-school education," which I did very well except for math. I was really pleased. That was the extent of my ambition to that time. About a year later, I thought it might be fun to go to college. So I chose psychology and introduction to algebra, and I thought-- [man] what's the connection? Two courses that I thought I could handle. I thought if I flunk them, no harm done. I got an "a" in each one. There was no holding me back. So I went to--I attended school, and I loved it. I loved every minute.

Colleges and universities are seeing more older adults in the classroom. Will this graying of the student population affect the way teachers teach? One of the... Interesting things about older adults is that they become much clearer, many of them, about what's important to them and what's important for them to learn and to deal with in their daily lives. And so therefore, you have to do a better sale job on them on why they should listen to you, why this information is important. This goes under the heading of meaningfulness. The material needs to be made meaningful. Concrete examples need to be given. I don't mean cement examples. I mean examples in detail that are relevant to their lives and that they can relate to.

I teach a three-hour class, and that's long. Wind me up, and I go for three hours. But I think it's important for the instructors to take a break or to mix the lecture format with the discussion format as much as possible, to introduce some variety, to introduce a tape example or, um...a movie of some sort, to really break up the learning experience, to use a variety of mechanisms to make teaching more interesting for the learner.

Testing I found difficult. I did not test very well, per se, but writing papers, I didn't mind. A lot of the courses have to do with group dynamics, and I enjoyed that participation. I think I got more out of it that way than just having a lecture. Sometimes older students face barriers in the classroom. Sometimes our educational system has ageism built into it. Sometimes the classrooms are up three flights of stairs, and the person who may not be as healthy as a 22-year-old has difficulty getting up those stairs. Sometimes they're sitting in a classroom of young, bright, fast-responding people, and the slower, more measured, more careful response that's typical of an older person may not be fast enough to get a word in edgewise. They may feel they aren't as bright or as good as the younger students. They may want to talk about life experience, and that may not be relevant to the questions on the exam.

There's much potential for ageism in the educational system. Peer education centers represent one of the newest developments in adult education. Under the model established by the institute for learning and retirement, older adults have joined forces to share knowledge and teach each other as group leaders instead of as traditional teachers. We're the institute for learning and retirement, a group of 400 retired adults who band together to continue to learn. Um...part of it is that we're all in this together, all 400 of us, and some of us are the expert in the classroom, the first among equals. Some of us are only the coordinator for people coming together to look at a subject. Some people like to lecture, and there will be an hour's lecture presentation and then good discussion afterwards. Peer programs have been initiated by older adults themselves. Some of them have started through continuing education departments in colleges. Some of them have started with an organizing committee of interested senior citizens in the community, went to the college president and knocked on his door and said, "we want to continue to learn. We have a powerful new tool here." that's the way we got started. We wanted to emphasize the fact that the people attending these sessions had the right to participate and express opinions rather than having a professor sit up there and read a lecture, as they sometimes did.

In my own experience as an undergraduate, I don't remember any class I ever took in which there was a discussion of any kind. Uh...and things have changed. And people of our age certainly are more experienced, I hope. And, uh...some of our attitudes have changed a great deal from what they once were, and we're eager to explain them and discuss them and compare with other people's views. I think that explains a study group. We don't, by the way-- study group leaders don't get paid. These are volunteers. What the exciting thing about the classes is, nobody is there unless they really want to be. Nobody is teaching the class unless they're fascinated with the subject, so that you have a perfect learning environment. One of my favorite courses was physics, and I took that because I knew nothing about physics, and I found it was a whole new world open to me. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but I also learned if I sat very quietly and watched what I said, no one would know what I didn't know.

Memory

In order to learn, we must be able to remember. Much of our intellectual power is based on memory and experience. How does our memory function as we age? It's interesting how often the topic of memory comes up in discussions of aging and how self-conscious older people are about their memories, and now they develop almost a phobia of alzheimer's disease. Uh..."I forgot my keys" or "I forgot the book" or "I left the milk out. I guess I'm getting alzheimer's disease." this quick, self-depreciating kind of, uh...reference that, uh...people make. I will say this. My brain has practically ossified. I really think so. I can't remember anything, don't remember anything. I read because I like to read the words. I like the way they're used. I like words, and I like words more than one syllable. So I read and enjoy them thoroughly, but...I find myself-- this is so embarrassing-- I find it necessary to turn back to find out what I was reading about-- what this page had to do with what I was now reading. You needn't tell me that isn't an embarrassment-- that you can't remember what you just read. It's the most trying thing. It's old age. My brain is...vanishing.

does our memory really fall apart as we get older? Dr. Birren provides some evidence to the contrary. There are differences in the way memory works with time, but it's not necessarily negative. One thing I would say is a general principle-- the healthy brain, the healthy nervous system, continues to gain information over the life span. You could measure that by the vocabulary size of individuals. If you take and measure the vocabulary size of, uh, pretty well-educated young adults, say age 22, they might know 22,000 words of the english language. The english language is much bigger than that. But at 65, those same people would know, perhaps, 45,000 words. So you continue to gain information throughout the life span, assuming reasonably good health. If you're ill, that's something else again. So, uh...one of the characterizations of old age is that it, uh...you show an increase of experience, increase in memory. Now, this raises a question of access to memory. And more frequently, it's the retrieval from memory which is the issue rather than memory itself.

The second day of the battle, lee attacked... As a guide for the gettysburg civil war battlefield, james tate exercises his memory of historical names and dates on every tour, yet he remains concerned about being able to recall information. Most of the time, we're talking something about the civil war. We have our own library up there. So your knowledge of it has increased through the years, as long as you can remember a lot of things. And when johnson attacked, he outnumbered them about 3-to-1.

One of the great fears of growing older is the possibility of decline in our ability to recall information. Research suggests that young people may have more memory lapses than older people. On the second day of the battle... My colleagues and I have just reported a paper at the gerontological society meeting in which we had 360 people of a different age range, sort of age 20 on up through the 80's. It turned out that younger people actually report more lapses in attention and memory in the day than did the old people. They say, "well, what's behind this?" young people are impulsive. They're quick to act, but in the process of being quick to react, they also bump some previous intention they had out of their nervous system. So this is a very interesting thing. We did some further statistical analyses of the results. It does appear that while lapses in memory and attention go down with age, older people are more likely to lose track of what they intended to do over longer spans of the day. So the young people are impulsive, they lapse more, but they don't seem to blame themselves for the lapses.

Older persons, for some reason, set a higher standard of expectation of themselves. Ilse darling is a community activist and a volunteer participant in a federal study exploring age changes over the life span. Despite her community accomplishments and ability to complete major reports for projects, she berates herself for her memory. I forget people's names and the names of objects. I forget numbers, but they'll sometimes pop up. The worst thing is, I know a lot of people because of jobs i've done around the state. I'll walk up to somebody I knew for five years, and I can't remember the person's name. The worst thing is that I lose things all over my house, and I'm thinking of moving into a one-story dwelling so I can't have things lost on three floors. I've been writing this report, and I keep losing the pieces of paper that I need. And I told the president, "when you got me, you got a failing memory, too, with this project." I don't know if I'm worse than others. Nobody will tell me. I know that my friends and I all laugh about it. We laugh at each other when we say, "I forgot," because we're all going through this to some extent. I think I'm worse than some of the others. I don't know. It's very frustrating.

Some older adults who are hardest on themselves have had prodigious memories in earlier life. Ilse contrasts herself to her husband who forgot many things earlier in life. I was married to somebody who was very absent-minded. I had to be sure that we got places on time, we went to the right place, we had the tickets. I thought my husband would lose a child when I left him with one of them. He would get into a book. Once we lost the dog-- we got him back. I was the one that took care of that kind of thing, of remembering things. So I was, you know, I was organized. I'm still organized, but I seem to lose lists, and, uh, sometimes... And these days, when I go somewhere, I go out to do, say, five errands, I really have to write them down, or I forget one of them.

Memory function falls into three categories-- sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. Sensory memory involves sights and sounds which are perceived but not stored for future recall. An example would be our perception of a passing street scene. We don't recall every sign or pedestrian's face we pass. Aging has little effect on sensory memory.

Short-term memory involves things momentarily remembered and then forgotten, such as a new phone number. Experiences, knowledge, and strategies that are important in our lives move through sensory memory to short-term memory and are stored or encoded in long-term memory. Long-term memory appears to have unlimited capacity. If we want to recall information, memories must be retrieved from long-term storage and brought into short-term active memory.

In aging, short-term memory functioning becomes less efficient. The result is that less information is transferred to long-term memory. Some information is lost. Retrieval is also slower and can result in difficulties such as recalling names of people you don't see very often. I tend to like to think about memory in terms of an analogy with a computer. Mind you, the brain is more complex than any computer we know about today, but they have features in common, the brain and a computer. One is we have a long-term store in the brain. Then we have a scanning mechanism that scans what's in long-term store.

We also have, like a computer, software. These have to do with the strategies. If you ask me about the changes with age, I have--what happens to this computer in the head, it looks like long-term store in the normal nervous system is not much affected. It gets increasing amounts of information, and sometimes, we fail to form association because we have too large a long-term memory to scan. We also develop with age softwares or strategies to control our own behavior.

One of the most important memory strategies we use for long-term memory is that we organize information. The common example is the file cabinet. Um, the easier it is to retrieve material, the better you file it and more systematically you file it, and what filing means in terms of memory is organizing that material into meaningful categories or headers or bits of information. Memory and memory strategies are subjects that occupy the minds of many older adults. So far, I don't really see a difference in remembering, uh, thankfully, because some of my friends are having a lot of trouble, but I laugh, really, at myself when I don't remember, because I do think it's just that I have many things on my mind more than the fact that my memory is changing. I would like to interject here an interesting point on mary sue's memory. She has an uncanny ability to put things somehow rather in her memory bank so that she can run down the alphabet, and she'll stop at the letter. Say a man's name is dexter, and we can't think of his name, and she'll go down that memory bank. Every time that works. Some kind of-- I don't know how that fits into the brain situation. I hope I don't lose that. It's saved my life several times.

These stone walls were built by farmers. Memory is also supported by context-- that is, the situation in which an activity usually occurs. It's almost as if the context or the environment supports our access to our memories. A doctor in the operating room isn't really under demand of memory because the whole situation seems so supported by the context of the task itself. Take the person out of the particular situation that supports the memory, and memory is much more demanding to us. So individual differences, I think, are in part related to how much we can use the context around us to help us remember, and this certainly is available to us in our jobs or other situations where we don't really notice memory losses because it just seems so natural for us to perform these kinds of tasks. So context is certainly a factor. Jim tate uses context to trigger his memory and retrieve information about the civil war. Well, you find after you do this so many times... In fact, if you go by a certain monument, something just clicks right into your mind, and it gets to be a routine thing. This is just my idea.

Attention is part of what I spoke of as encoding or learning. One can't recall or retrieve what one didn't pay attention, like misplacing your keys. I think my problem is trying to do too many things at the same time. I have to set limits. That is the truth. We--we-- that's a constant problem. You can't do two things at the same time. That's the one thing john and I differ. He does one thing at a time. He finishes it, and he puts it away. I can work on 15 things at the same time. It frustrates the hell out of him. He can't stand that. There are some slight little differences. Slippages. And i--and I try to-- I try to justify that, and younger people will say, "but I forget things, too." I think it's because we're preoccupied. Like, for instance, you may be holding the salt and pepper shakers, and you walk to the refrigerator to put them in rather than in the cupboard. I find other people do those things, too.

Finding strategies for storage and recall of information can help us make better use of our memory skills. Remembering information in chunks may help in retrieval. Some important work on memory training was done by paul baltes in berlin. Baltes used a method of chunking for improving the memory span. Older adults familiar with the city of west berlin were taken through and were shown a series of landmarks, and they were asked to remember this sequence of landmarks. Then, information--words-- were presented to the individuals, and they were somehow to associate the word with a particular location or locus that they know. So, the first item would be associated with the first item on their mental travel through the city. The next word would be associated with the second place. To recall the list of words, they would have to take a memory trip through the city and think of each word paired with that location. By doing this, baltes and his colleagues were able to show that the memory span of older adults can be increased dramatically-- I think as many as 70 items or so. Now, the normal span of our memories used to be considered something like seven or eight chunks.

Other forms of association are also helpful to retrieval. When you're introduced to a new person, repeating that person's name, linking things about that person to that person's name, thinking about that name shortly after meeting that person so that you create a whole context of facts and associations related to that name are important in the encoding of the learning of the name, and that should facilitate the recall or the retrieval of that information.

There have been some studies done on using of imagery, of associating the name with physical characteristics of the face of that person. Sometimes, that can be useful, too. Surnames of people are very difficult, usually, to learn and to recall, because there's no association to them. The people that teach mnemonic systems would say, "well, does a person's name remind you of anything?" so you can form a visual image or verbal association, so that those retrieval hooks can pull it out later. For example, my name birren means very little. On the other hand, when I introduced myself to you, i'd say, "think of my holding a beer, and then you have beer in." once you get that imagery, you don't forget it.

When all else fails, some older people use cover-up strategies that they've probably honed over a lifetime. One of the ways I deal with it is just admitting i've forgotten. And then in this introduction business-- i've always been terrorized by introductions, uh, feeling I couldn't remember their names, and so, uh, I say, "well, you two know each other, don't you?" and that will break the ice, and they'll understand that I have a lapse of memory and introduce themselves to each other.

Some older adults feel good memory should be automatic. They're embarrassed to use memory strategies. One interesting anecdote is that sometimes adults, particularly older adults, think that use of these strategies are tricks and are cheating. They think just almost by heroics, just like sheer muscle power, sheer brain power, they should remember long lists of words or long passages, and one of the things we have to communicate to adults is that these what they call tricks or strategies are really the difference between a novice and an expert. The expert knows these strategies and uses them, and they're not cheating. That's how one improves one's ability in certain areas.

It's o.k. If I'm paying attention to what I'm doing. I can't always find my keys if I misplace them. That's why I have this clip on my purse, so I can clip the car keys and the house keys right there. I don't lay them around. I don't just helter-skelter put them somewhere. I have a definite place where I put them, so when I go out, there they are.

The other distinction I think we need to make particularly in memory is between what we call internal and external memory aids. Internal memory aids are organizing information, chunking it, using memory, imagery, uh, things that you do cognitively to enhance your memory, but the most common memory aids that we all use-- this is true of everybody-- are what we call external aids-- making lists, keeping calendars, using a timer. There's nothing wrong with those aids.

I write myself notes, and I'm not ashamed of that. I plan my day with a list of things. My difficulty there is that I list too many things and feel that I want to accomplish what I used to be able to accomplish in a day. I have trouble there. I'm trying to eliminate and just do a few things.

Speed of behavior

One of the most vivid images of old age is an older person moving, talking, and thinking slowly. The pace of our response to our environment depends on how quickly we process the need to respond and the actual physical time it takes to make the response. For example, how quickly do we perceive an oncoming car, and how quickly does our body respond? This is called reaction time or speed of response.

Reaction time is an important product of both physical and intellectual functioning. Psychology has been interested in reaction time for many years-- the speed with which you move a finger in response to the sudden onset of a light or the sudden onset of a tone. In the last century, there was a very famous english psychologist, galton, who had a health exposition in kensington gardens, london. There were thousands going through this health exposition, and he gave them some 17 different measures. Among them, visual acuity, auditory acuity, and speed of response, and he found that by and large, older people were slower in their speed of response. Although this slowing is due to age-related changes in the central nervous system, experience, skill, and mental strategies may compensate for a slower central nervous system in older persons, so they keep performing efficiently.

One interesting study done in the laboratory of timothy salthouse has been concerned with the interesting phenomenon that you can find that older typists perform every bit as well as younger typists. The puzzling question then arises-- why is that possible? Well, salthouse, in his work in breaking down the components of typing behavior, found that older typists had developed compensating behavior. What they did is pick up larger chunks of information from the type script than did younger typists, and so they were able to essentially function more efficiently. They had compensated for an age-related loss in reaction time. In very complex tasks, mental strategies and special knowledge may help us retain the speed of response. When we study experts who are finding, say, critical cells or critical bacterial items under microscopic displays, we don't seem to find perceptual declines. In other words, in these skill domains, older people can filter, search, and detect and identify critical information just as readily as younger individuals can. So, again, we're posing the paradox of how can individuals carry out perceptual tasks so efficiently in their domain of expertise and yet show very dramatic and substantial age declines in general perceptual processes. Again, we think the importance of knowledge is involved here, and there may even be, um, more basic perceptual processes that are improved by experience, and these might involve the search process directly. In fact, it may be that our experts don't even see distracters in this field, that they can go practically automatically to the target information. However, in new situations where experience is limited, younger people may respond more quickly.

An older adult might not learn as quickly as a younger adult in a brand-new domain-- learning calculus for the first time, learning a new language for the first time, or something very abstract, but if it's a situation that, um, has some familiarity or where there's some previous knowledge that could be applied to the task, the losses in that initial learning speed are less evident.

General health and level of fitness may affect the speed of response. We've also found out that a large part of the slowing is related to physical status of the individuals. So, i've had dissertations, students have done doctoral research at the university, looking at speed of response in physically fit older persons and unfit older persons comparison with fit young and unfit young. And fit older persons are very often in a range between the fit and unfit young. So, fitness itself and activity are important. Exercise does modify the changes we thought were inevitable with advancing age, that a large part of what we attributed to age initially is due to the presence of illness, and then the next step is to the lack of physical exercise. I think because I do a garden and because I do a lawn, I think I'm in good physical condition. Maybe not as much as-- I'm 68. I think that if someone my age was not doing the physical things that i've done as far as working in the garden and walking, they possibly, you know, wouldn't be as active or as able to do things as I am. As far as reaction time, it's really interesting. Once in a while, when young people are around, something will fall, and i'll grab it. They'll go, "yay, ma! Good reaction!" my reactions are pretty good, too. I think part of that is keeping physically active.

Skills and experience can often compensate for age-related slowing. It's important not to look at one change in isolation. So often, somebody can experience a change, but it can be compensated for in another direction. So, for example, one of the very few changes that is attributed to aging is change in reaction time. But, of course, not everybody needs to be a race car driver at the age of 75. One of the things that compensates for a change in reaction time is growth in life experience.

When maintaining speed isn't possible, older adults develop other strategies to remain productive. Older musicians, for example, use their knowledge of music to retain a high level of performance by anticipating the next series of notes. How can they do that? Well, they're probably looking farther ahead if they're looking at sheet music, or they just have expectancies about what comes next that allow the performance to be maintained at a very high level. When that information is not available, when we don't have advanced knowledge or expectancies, I think older people could be at a loss.

Older adults develop unique strategies to keep pace. As adapting human beings, we recognize we are slower, so we develop a control strategy to avoid the consequences. What would be an example of that? Well, older men and women in industry dislike, in their later years, machine-paced jobs. They tend to want, with their seniority, to drift off an assembly line and get into a self-paced job. Self-paced job would be someone who repairs violins. A musical instrumentmaker would be self-paced, lot of skill maximizing the opportunity of expressing.

We did a research project on this very thing of watching older people cross a traffic intersection in relation to the timing of the stoplights, and what we discovered was that a very old person would attach themselves to a young person without the young person knowing it, and they would go across the street in an implicit convoy, and they'd get across safely. That way, they don't have to scan traffic and watch other things. They just watch this person next to them, and so, that would be a compensation. That means you can get across the street without worrying much about your speed.

I was involved in discussions of airline pilots and the age of flying. The older pilot may avoid the conditions that taxes his ability. The young person, the young pilot, may want to tax his ability to see how good he is. Very different kinds of things. Younger persons often play chicken with events to see if they can win. The older person stays away from those limiting conditions. As a result, their performance in safety factors is often better and more competent. So, there's the question of where the software beats out. The tortoise does win the race over the hare.

With their typing. An individual's attitude plays an important role, too. When kitty conroy faced a difficult on-the-job typing test, her perseverance carried her through several failures. At home I could do 41 words a minute. I only had to pass 35. I went for my typing test, and I couldn't use the keyboard. I became so nervous, and I flunked, of course, if I had five wrong. I think they penalize us about seven per word, and I tried, and they would send me back. At one point, I was going to quit. I just simply couldn't pass this typing test, yet I was highly capable. I would go home, "I didn't pass again." he said, "try again. You'll always be sorry you didn't try once more." it was terrible. I went there on the ninth try-- ninth try. I had figured this was it. I was going to quit after this. I'd made up my mind, "I don't care anymore. "I won't have this nice job. I can't pass the test." I was the same way with my c.a. Degree. You get to a point where you just say, "this is it." by george, I only missed one word or something. I was almost there. So, I was all up again, and I said, "I go one more time. Just one more time." I went the 10th time, and I passed. I don't even know how much I got. I danced out of the office and danced back to work, and I kept the job until I retired, loving every minute of it.

Good. General health, fitness, experience, skill, and practice all affect behavioral slowing in aging. Changing values and motivation also account for some shifts in how quickly we move in our everyday lives. Some older people deliberately choose a slower pace. I think we slow down as we tend to get older. Things important 20 years ago, today if we looked them up, we'd say, "I was concerned 20 years ago." today, they have no significance in our lives. So, therefore, I think we've become a lot slower, a lot easier-going. Easier-going would be the word. I do get frustrated, because it takes so much longer to do things that I used to do quickly. Even the drudgery of cleaning house-- I used to be able to say, "now, tomorrow, i'll go through everything," and I did. Now, by the time I finish one room, I'm ready to sit or do nothing. It's just that you lose interest in keeping things the way they were. It's frustrating, because I like to have them look as they did, but I like time to be creative. It's a constant battle.

I try very hard to keep active. I exercise, and I go to an exercise class twice a week because I feel it's important to keep physically active, but to answer your question, I do feel that the body has slowed up a little bit. It takes me a little bit longer to do things, but it isn't just physical. It's by choice as well. I'm not hurrying as much. Things don't bother me as much as before. I don't get angered very easily, do you know? I find that I'm a lot more peaceful.

Top of page