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Showing Original Post only (View all)Older adults can blame 'clutter' for difficulties with memory [View all]
Theres a paradox in memory science: Empirical evidence and life experience both suggest older adults have more knowledge of the world. However, in laboratory settings, they generally perform worse on memory tests than younger adults. What can explain the disparity?
The answer might be clutter, according to a review of memory studies published Friday in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science.
Tarek Amer is a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia and Harvard Universities and the reviews first author. While some scientists think that as adults grow older, they begin to form impoverished memories memories that contain less information relative to the memories of younger people Amer and his colleagues have a different view. Instead, older adults might actually be forming too many associations between information, Amer said.
Compared to young adults, healthy older adults (defined in the paper as 60 to 85 years old) process and store too much information, most likely because of greater difficulty suppressing irrelevant information, the analysis found. This difficulty is described as reduced cognitive control and can explain the cluttered nature of older adults memory representations.
Its not that older adults dont have enough space to store information, Amer said. Theres just too much information thats interfering with whatever theyre trying to remember.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/memory-issues-older-people-result-clutter-rcna15133
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I knew I was right when I joked with my kids that "the chips were getting full"!