PSY 3490 M Tutorial

1. PSY 3490 M Tutorial March 4/10

2. Chapter 5 Person-Environment Interactions and Optimal Aging

3. Person-Environment Interactions • B = f (P,E) Competence • Person’s capacity to function in 5 domains (biological health, sensory-perceptual functioning, motor and cognitive skills, ego strength) Environmental Press • Varying demands (physical, interpersonal, social) that environments place on an individual To have a good adaptation level, older adults need to lower the environmental press and increase competence

4. Stress and Coping Framework • Adaptation depends on one’s perceptions of environmental stress and their attempts to cope • Protective impact of social support systems • The Loss Continuum Concept • Aging as a progressive series of losses that reduces one’s social participation (e.g. loss of social roles, income, mobility) • Thus, home and neighborhood take on more importance

5. Long-Term Care Facilities • Chronic Care • In-patient, hospital setting providing high level of personal care and specialized treatments • Nursing Homes • Provide moderate to high levels of personal care • Assisted Living Faculties • Provide supportive living arrangements for people who need assistance • Adult Foster Care • House people who need assistance of ADL due to disabilities or chronic disorders

6. Social-Psychological Perspective • Importance of maintaining a sense of personal control in maintaining well-being • Five aspects of nursing homes fail to make residents feel competent and in control • Placement in nursing home, label of ‘nursing home resident’, staff’s care toward residents, physical aspects of environment, routine • In order to make a positive impact, increase level of control, have residents actively involved in creating their environment, and in decision making

7. Chapter 6Attention and Perceptual Processing

8. Information-Processing Model • Information enters the system and is transformed, coded and stored in various ways • Sensory Memory • Earliest step in IP. Has a large capacity but is very short lived. • No age differences • Attentional Processes • Influenced by the capacity to direct and sustain attention • Age-related limitations impact attentional processes

9. Attention • Which information is processed beyond sensory memory is determined by attention • Selective Attention • Multiple sources of information are available for processing, but only a subset is relevant (e.g. driving) • Moving from large-capacity store, to a very small-capacity story (working memory) • age differences in ability to selectively attend to information • Due to greater difficulty in filtering out or inhibiting irrelevant information in older adults

10. Divided Attention • The ability to successfully perform more than one task at the same time • No differences found on easy tasks, but are found on complex tasks • No age differences when older adults are given extensive practice • Sustained Attention • The ability to sustain attention over long periods of time • Age related declines in vigilance performance, but not vigilance decrement

11. Main Conclusion for Research on Attention • Age differences are greatest when older adults perform complex tasks, especially more than one at a time….but why?

12. Speed of Processing • As people age, the speed with which one makes a response, decreases • older adults take longer to decide to make a response • As reaction time tasks become more complex, older adults become even slower (e.g. driving a car) • Minimizing age differences: • Experience/practice, exercise and fitness training increases blood circulation and neurological functioning

13. Language Processing • Involves interactions between sensory system and basic information-processing abilities • Language comprehension is usually not impaired before the age of 80 • Speech recognition and speech discrimination decline with age, although older adults use context to figure what was said

14. Chapter 7Memory

15. How is Information kept in Mind for Additional Processing? • Working Memory • Holding information in mind and using that information to solve a problem, make decisions, or learn new information • A limited capacity where only a few items can be processed at once • Declines in working memory related to • Declines in storage capacity • Declines in the ability to allocate capacity to more than one task • Slower rates of information processing • Age-related declines are not universal • Differences due to: information provided, type and complexity of task, gender, life experience

16. Long-Term Memory • Involves the ability to remember extensive amounts of information over a few seconds to a few hours to decades • Explicit memory • Deliberate and conscious remembering of information e.g. information from specific event/time, information for facts and concepts • Implicit memory • Change in task performance that is attributable to having been exposed to information at some earlier point in time

17. Age Differences in Episodic Memory • Older adults perform worse than younger adults on tests of episodic memory recall tests because they • Omit information • Include more intrusions • repeat more previously recalled items • Age differences can be reduced by • Slowing the presentation pace • Providing time to practice • Using familiar stimuli

18. Age Differences inSemantic Memory • Very small changes in semantic memory with increased age • No differences in language comprehension, and activation of general knowledge • Declines are found in accessibility to semantic memories • Older adults have more trouble finding words and have more tip-of-the-tongue experiences

19. Memory for Everyday Life • Spatial Memory • Older adults have poorer performance for location than younger adults. However, age differences are typically eliminated when familiar locations/objects are tests or contextual cues are given • Prospective Memory • Remembering to perform a planned act in the future (event vs. time-based) • Age differences are less likely on event-based prospective memory because there are more contextual cues than on time-based tasks

20. Self-Evaluations of Memory Abilities • Involves making ratings of one’s own memory ability based on • our memory performance, our theories about how memory works, our attributions and judgements of our effectiveness • Older adults view memory as • less stable, expect decline with age, and perceive they have little control over it • Older adults with lower memory self-efficacy translate to poorer memory performance

21. Memory Strategies • Most memory strategies have several things in common • They require paying attention to the incoming information • Rely on already stored information to facilitate making new connections with the new material • The best strategies are those that, in the process of encoding, provide the basis for future retrieval cues

22. Chapter 8Intelligence

23. Defining Intelligence • There are many abilities that underlie intelligence, and are measured using standardized test performance with an emphasis on correct answers • Primary mental abilities • Independent abilities that are measured by intelligence tests and form factors (i.e. verbal meaning, spatial orientation, math reasoning , processing speed etc.) • Age-related changes • There are increases in primary mental abilities until one’s late 30s, scores stabilize until early 60s, and then there are declines until the mid-70s

24. Secondary Mental Abilities • Broad ranged skills that reflect clusters of several primary mental abilities • Fluid Intelligence: the abilities that make you a flexible and adaptive thinker e.g. solving mazes, puzzles. Shows normative age-related decline • Crystallized intelligence: knowledge you have acquired through life experience and education e.g. definition of words, historical facts and literature. No decline until very late in life

25. Moderators of Intellectual Change • Cohort differences • Generational differences due to changes in amount of education • Information Processing • Perceptual speed, working memory, and ability to inhibit tend to show decline during later adulthood and account for changes in fluid and crystallized intelligence • Social and Lifestyle Variables • Occupations that require complex thought and independent judgment raise the level of people’s intellectual functioning, as does higher education and SES, exposure to stimulating environments, and strong social connections • Health • Functioning of the brain itself impacts intelligence, such has Alzheimer's disease, depression

26. Cognitive-Structural Approach • Focuses on the ways in which people think • Piaget’s Theory: intelligence develops through activity which stems from the emergence of increasingly complex cognitive structures • Sensorimotor period: infants gain knowledge via sensory and motor skills • Preoperational: young children’s thinking is often egocentric (all people experience the world just as they do) • Concrete operational: logical reasoning emerges • Formal Operational: thinking in a very systematic, step-by-step way. Approaching problem solving in a logical, methodical way to arrive at one unambiguous solution to the problem

27. Postformal Thought • Developmental progressions in adult thought • Is characterized by the recognition that truth varies from situation to situation • Ambiguity and contradiction are the rule rather than the exception • Emotion and subjective factors usually play a role in thinking

28. Reflective Judgment • How people reason through dilemmas involving current affairs, religion, science etc. • Progression from: • Absolutist thinking: believing there is only one correct solution to problems and personal experience provides truth • Relativistic thinking: realizing that there are many sides to any issue and the right answer depends on the circumstance • Dialectical thinkers: see the merit in different viewpoints and are able to synthesize them into a workable solution