Critical Thinking in Psychology: Aging and Cognitive Decline

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms and concepts related to aging, cognitive decline, and driving abilities in the elderly.

Neural Pruning

Soon after birth, we have more neurons and connections than we ever will, which is related to concepts such as the critical period of development.

Cognitive Decline

The trend for nearly all of cognition is a peak very early in either childhood, adolescence, or early adulthood, and then a steady decline until death.

Dementia

By age 85, between 1/3 and 1/2 of all people suffer from some form of dementia.

Sensory Decline with Age

All senses get worse with age, including hearing (damage to hair cells in the cochlea), taste (loss of taste receptors), and vision (macular degeneration).

Regional Cerebral Blood Flow (rCBF)

Relates to attention, involving blood flow during selective attention tasks.

Attention Limits

Include speed limit (tracking speed), acuity limits (capacity, crowding), all of which decline with age.

Hippocampal Atrophy

The Hippocampus (processing memory, including encoding and retrieval) slowly atrophies over time, considered a normal part of aging.

Sensory Memory and Aging

Due to presbyopia, presbycusis, et cetera, Sensory Memory is affected, which will in turn affect the accuracy of further stages of memory encoding.

Short-Term Memory and Aging

Due to slower reaction time and other difficulties with attention, information in Short-Term Memory is less likely to be rehearsed effectively and thus is more likely to be forgotten.

Long-Term Memory and Aging

Long-Term memories are affected the most, due to a combination of blocking, transience, and hippocampal atrophy.

Dementia

A general term for a decline in mental ability severe enough to interfere with daily life.

Alzheimer’s Disease

One type of dementia in which abnormal deposits of plaque and tangled proteins cause the affected neurons to die. This is NOT a normal part of aging.

Alzheimer’s Disease Impact

Affects the hippocampus first before spreading to other areas, including the frontal lobe, causing symptoms including memory loss, disorientation, emotional instability, and eventual loss of control over bodily functions.

Presbycusis

Natural hearing loss

Spatial Awareness in Elderly

Difficulty in tasks involving spatial awareness is observed in the elderly due to problems with Short Term Memory, affecting concepts such as constancy, spatial perception, and mental rotation.

Inductive Reasoning

Being able to identify patterns, taking new information and generalizing based on that information, includes tasks involving spatial awareness. Declines with age.

Deductive Reasoning

Utilizing general knowledge to make specific conclusions. This remains relatively stable with age.

Fluid Intelligence

Also known as Fluid Reasoning, the ability to deal with new and unusual problems, identifying patterns, and problem solving. This declines with age.

Crystallized Intelligence

Acquired knowledge, including verbal knowledge (vocabulary) and expertise in a subject. This increases with age.

Anosognosia

Generally defined as the lack of awareness of an illness. In the context of an individual with dementia, it means the loss of insight into one’s own cognitive or functional deficits.

Change Blindness

The tendency for people to not notice gradual changes in their cognitive abilities. Individuals are unlikely to tell that they’re becoming worse drivers with age

Confirmation Bias

Our propensity to favor evidence that confirms our ideas while disregarding evidence that doesn’t.

Belief Perseverance

The tendency to continue to believe things even after our reasons to believe them have been undermined.