As the years go by, I find that I have learned many new things. I feel as if I have an amazing storehouse of information. At the same time, I am also noticing that it is getting harder to maintain peak performance.
It's not in every situation nor all the time. There are times when I feel as if I am working better than I ever have. Then there are other times when I have trouble remembering the name of someone I've known for years but haven't seen in a while. I am on my way to do something and I get distracted and completely forget what I was supposed to do. It's these little oversights and omissions that make me wonder if I'm just getting old.
New research indicates that there may be a scientific reason for these developments. There is some good news on this front. While it is generally accepted that memory and recall performance declines starting at age 25, more recent research seems to indicate that the drop-off is not as steep as it was commonly perceived to be.
Dr. Carstensen and others have found, too, that with age people become biased in their memory toward words and associations that have a positive connotation — the “age-related positivity effect,” as it’s known. This bias very likely applies when older people perform so-called paired-associate tests, a common measure that involves memorizing random word pairs, like ostrich and house.
“Given that most cognitive research asks participants to engage with neutral (and in emotion studies, negative) stimuli, the traditional research paradigm may put older people at a disadvantage,” Dr. Carstensen said by email.
The new data-mining analysis also raises questions about many of the measures scientists use. Dr. Ramscar and his colleagues applied leading learning models to an estimated pool of words and phrases that an educated 70-year-old would have seen, and another pool suitable for an educated 20-year-old. Their model accounted for more than 75 percent of the difference in scores between older and younger adults on items in a paired-associate test, he said.
That is to say, the larger the library you have in your head, the longer it usually takes to find a particular word (or pair).
In other words, it seems that as you get older, it's just harder to find what you are looking for in the attic of your mind!
Here is the link to the full article: http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/27/the-older-mind-may-just-be-a-fuller-mind/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
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