Lecture 3: Biological Aging (Continued) & Attention

1. Lecture 3: Biological Aging (Continued) & Attention September 26, 2007

2. Today’s Lecture • What interventions can facilitate aging from a physical and psychological point of view? • How do older adults cope with stress? • Discuss research proposal. • What are different subtypes of attention & how are these affected by aging? • How does time of day affect our ability to pay attention? • What is speed of processing and how does it change with aging?

3. Diabetes • Possibility of multiple complications: Nerve damage, retinopathy, CVAs,... • Impact on cognition: Most common finding is psychomotor slowing (Ryan, 2005). • Cognitive dysfunction is associated with poorer blood sugar control (Munshi et al., 2006).

4. Hormonal Changes • Human Growth Factor • Menopause in women: • Hormone replacement therapy: While it seems to reduce likelihood of colorectal cancer, and fractures, it increases risks of breast cancer, stroke, blood clots,… • At this point in time, it appears the drawbacks are greater than the benefits for most women. • In men, decrease in testosterone levels.

5. Review: The Neuron

6. How Does Our Brain Age? • Loss of neurons: Much less than was believed in previous decades. • Cabeza (2002): HAROLD model • Aging reduces asymmetry in functioning between the two hemispheres, most particularly in the frontal lobes. • Compensation vs. Dedifferentiation • Different cognitive strategies or different neural mechanisms?

7. Pathological Changes • In the lecture on memory, we will discuss biological changes associated with Alzheimer’s such as neuritic plaques and neurofibrilliary tangles. • Parkinson’s disease: Death of dopaminergic neurons.

8. MRI, normal aging SPECT, normal aging MRI, Alzheimer’s disease SPECT, Alzheimer’s disease Images courtesy of: http://www.med.harvard.edu/AANLIB/home.html

9. Autonomic Nervous System • Difficulty with regulation of body temperature: Increased risk of hypothermia and hyperthermia. • Sleep: • Increase disturbances such as insomnia. • Multiphase rhythm • Physical health and pain can also impact on sleep quality. • Sleep apnea: Predictor of stroke.

10. To Return To Our Questions From Our Previous Lecture… • What do you think would happen out in the real world with those changes? • What obstacles do you think you would come across? • How do you think other people would respond to you? Would you feel different about yourself?

11. How Do Older Adults Perceive Their Health? Health Canada. (2002). Canada’s aging population. Ottawa, ON: Minister of Public Works and Government Services. Retrieved from http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/seniors-aines/pubs/fed_paper/pdfs/fedpager_e.pdf

12. Health Canada. (2002). Canada’s aging population. Ottawa, ON: Minister of Public Works and Government Services. Retrieved from http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/seniors-aines/pubs/fed_paper/pdfs/fedpager_e.pdf

13. Health Canada. (2002). Canada’s aging population. Ottawa, ON: Minister of Public Works and Government Services. Retrieved from http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/seniors-aines/pubs/fed_paper/pdfs/fedpager_e.pdf

14. Importance of Health Literacy • Study by Baker et al. (2007) • Link between mortality and health literacy: 3260 participants • Health Literacy: Ability to understand hospital forms and medication bottles. • Education only weakly associated with mortality: Education does not equal literacy, especially in older adults.

16. Why? • Less knowledge of chronic disease • Worse management of chronic conditions • Negative relation between health literacy and medication adherence in HIV+ patients for example. • Lower levels of cancer screenings • Lower levels of vaccination

17. Arthritis • Osteoarthritis vs. Rheumatoid arthritis

18. Management of Pain in Daily Life • Nonnarcotic (e.g. NSAIDs) and narcotic (e.g. morphine; usually not for arthritis) drugs • Deep and superficial skin stimulation such as massages • Electrical stimulation • Biofeedback • Relaxation, meditation or imagery • Distraction • Hypnosis

19. What Are the Changes in the Immune System? • Decreased defense against viruses. • Immune system becomes slower to react. • Vaccines must be given earlier to give time to the system to create antibodies. • Other co-occuring health problems can complicate action of immune system.

21. Stress Model • Hans Selye: First to study stress • General adaptation syndrome (GAS)

22. How Do We Think of Stressful Events? (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) • Primary Appraisal: Filter events we experience • Irrelevant • Benign or positive • Negative • Secondary Appraisal: Evaluating our ability to cope • Reappraisal

23. Coping With Stress • Problem-Focused Coping • Emotion-Focused Coping • Goodness of Fit hypothesis: Adaptivity of a coping strategy depends on match between strategy and stressor. • Different domains of stress between younger and older adults

24. Pharmacology and Aging • As people age, absorption and distribution of medication are more variable. • Older adults metabolize and execrete drugs more slowly → Increase risk of toxicity. • Issues of polypharmacy: Taking often a complex cocktail of drugs

25. Adherence to Treatment

27. Research Proposal Objectives • To expand your knowledge of aging by focusing on an area that is of particular interest to you. • To further develop your skills as a critical reader of psychological research. • To reflect on methodological techniques used in aging research. • To develop your scientific writing skills.

28. Topic Suggestions • Perception: Looking at changes in hearing can affect musical or language perception. • Attention: Time-of-day effects on attention • Memory: Source memory • Executive Functioning: Everyday problem-solving • Social Cognition: Stereotypes and ageism • Personality: Changes in introversion/extraversion. • Bereavement: Gender differences in grief • Mental Illness: Early-onset vs. late-onset depression • Family Relationships: Impact of caregiving on parent-child relationship.

29. Outline (Due October 17th) • 1 page using 12-point font. • Describe the specific topic you have picked, and what question you wish to explore. • General idea of the design: Does not have to be set in stone! • Use full sentences but can use bullet-point format. • Can use a title page, but not required as long as your name and student number are clearly indicated on outline. • Returned with my comments on October 24th .

30. Research Proposal (Due November 28th) • 5 to 7 double-spaced pages in length (not including title page, abstract, and references). • Minimum of 3 references. • Future tense for your paper since it is a proposal. • Sections: Introduction, method, results & discussion. • APA style.

31. General Marking Scheme • Your paper will be marked out of 30 points. The breakdown of points will be as follows (in order of appearance within the paper): • 1 point for title page/page headers/page numbers • 2 points for abstract • 6 points for the introduction • 8 points for methodology • 6 points for results and discussion • 3 points for reference list/references within the text • 2 points for style, grammar & spelling • 2 points for overall quality of the paper and creativity of the experiment

32. Example of Outline • Topic: I would like to study retrieval of source information in the aging brain. I will explore how two types of source information (perceptual vs. conceptual) are differentially affected by aging, and how that relates to changes in the activation of areas and networks within the brain.

33. Example of Outline Goal: This study will look at the underlying neural mechanisms associated with source memory, and how patterns of brain activation change with aging. We hypothesize that activation within the frontal lobes will become more bilateral as people age.

34. Methodology: Our study will use a paradigm inspired by Rahhal et al (2002). Participants will listen to statements read by different sources. After 10-minute interval, they will be shown statements through a projection screen in the scanner. Participants will need to identify whether they are new or old, and if they are old, they will need to identify the source of the voice or the truthfulness of the statements.

35. This experiment will have a 2 X 2 X 3 mixed factorial design, with age (young vs. old) manipulated across participants, and test type (voice-source or truth-source) and item type (new vs. old-true vs. old-false) manipulated within participants.

36. Attention • How would you define attention? • Based on everything we have discussed so far, what changes would you expect in attentional capacities in older adults? • Information-processing approach (Neisser, 1976): Explains how information is apprehended, processed, and remembered. • There are always bottom-up as well as top-down processes influencing what we attend to and remember.

37. Long-Term Memory External Initial Sensory Memory Elaboration and encoding Retrieval Stimuli Processing Short-Term Memory Forgetting Response Rehearsal Forgetting

38. Attention • Not a unitary construct. • Selective Attention: Ability to restrict awareness to a limited number of stimuli while ignoring others. e.g.: Focus on reading and not on people talking around you • Divided Attention: Managing many tasks concurrently. e.g.: Cooking while watching TV. • Sustained Attention: Being able to maintain attention over a period of time. e.g.: Following the plot of a movie.

39. Visual Search

40. What Changes Do We See In Selective Attention? • Greatest decreases when tasks are complex and little information is available to support. • Amount of attention one has available to devote to a particular situation might be decreased, which may be due to difficulty in inhibition…