UNDERSTANDING PSYCHOLOGY

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: COGNITIVE AGEING

Learning Objectives
You will be able to identify aspects of cognition that do and do not decline with age
You will be able to discuss key theories of cognitive ageing and their implications in
our understanding of executive function

The Ageing Population

Gerontologists and psychologists:
o Threshold for old age: 60 to 65 years
o Physical and psychological changes tend to be observable in the population
o The ‘young-old’ age is 60 to 75 years
o The ‘old-old’ is 75+ years

Measuring Cognitive Abilities in Ageing Studies

Cross-sectional designs
A snapshot of independent age groups (e.g. 18-25)
Cohort effects
People of varying ages studied
simultaneously Longitudinal designs
Same people studied over a period of time
Repeated measures (same participants measured at different-time
points (e.g. 18, 26, 50)
Practice effects

Reasoning
Deductive reasoning
Inference of particular instances from a general
law Inductive reasoning
Inference of general laws from particular
instances Analogical reasoning
Thinking that is based on an analogy
Figure weight test
Visuospatial reasoning
Representation and mental manipulation of visuospatial information
Matrix reasoning (subset of the Wechsler adult intelligence scale, WAIS)

Potential account for age-related decline in reasoning ability

Salthouse (2005)
• Comprehension
Age effects still observed after excluding participants who did
not comprehend the task instructions
• Speed of processing
Deficit observed when there is no time constraints on tasks
• Strategy-use
 Limited research on this Working memory
Essential for reasoning

Working Memory
System of memory involving short-term storage and processing of
information Storage:
o Digit span
Falls from 6.6 to 5.8 digits over adulthood (Parkinson et al, 1985)
o Spatial span
Corsi block task span falls from 5.1 to 4.7 blocks (Spinnler et al, 1988)

Updating
Older adults show more impairments on:
o Backwards digit span “5 8 9 6 1 4” “4 1 6 9 8 5”
Reading/ listening span
o A tortoise is a farm
animal Potential account
o Problems with inhibiting irrelevant material (May et al, 1999)
o Age-related decline on working memory potentially driven by
executive functioning

Episodic Memory
Memory for a personally experienced event
Both lab and more naturalistic tasks show age-related decline in episodic
memory (Ronnlund et al, 2005)
Associative deficit hypothesis
o Naveh-Benjamin (2000)
Older adults have difficulty with creating coherent episodes
This requires binding/associating information together in memory
What-where-when as basic elements of an episode
Age-related associative deficits have been found with a variety of materials
o E.g. word pairs, picture pairs, words and spatial
locations Likely due to inefficient encoding strategies
o Older adults’ performance improves after strategy training

Semantic Memory
Memory for factual and general
knowledge Piolino et al (2002)
o Dissociation between semantic memory and episodic
memory Retention of various forms of semantic memory
o Vocabulary
o Knowledge of historical facts
o Memory of personal events
Language Use in Ageing (Jemper and Sumner, 2001)
Younger adults (mean 23 years)
o Better at dealing with grammatical complexity
Associated with working memory
o Better with sentence length
o Better with propositional density
Number of basic ideas relative to the number of words
uttered Related to processing fluency
Older adults (mean 76 years)
o Larger vocabulary span
o More tip-of-the-tongue instances
Retrieval difficulty
o With lexical diversity

Theories Of Cognitive Ageing

Processing speed theory (Salthouse,
1996) o Limited time mechanism
When there is an external time limit, later processes are left
with insufficient time
o Simultaneity mechanism
Information from early processes are no longer available by the
time later processes are complete
o Processing speed declines with age, but does this account for all other
decline? Is it meaningful to talk about speed independent of the tasks?
Executive attention account (McCabe et al, 2010)
o McCabe et al (2010)
Shared component underlying WM and EF
WM and EF account for variance in episodic memory beyond
that accounted for by processing speed
Processing speed likely to be a mediating factor

Summary
A number of age-related cognitive decline is observed in older adulthood
o There is a clear dissociation between domains of memory that do and
don’t decline with age
Potential accounts for the decline include the processing speed theory and
the executive attention account