A review of 23 longitudinal studies of older adults (65+) has found that small amounts of alcohol were associated with lower incidence rates of overall dementia and Alzheimer dementia, but not of vascular dementia or age-related cognitive decline. A three-year German study involving 3,327 adults aged 75+ extends the evidence to the older-old.
Latest Research News
It’s well-established that feelings of encoding fluency are positively correlated with judgments of learning, so it’s been generally believed that people primarily use the simple rule, easily learned = easily remembered (ELER), to work out whether they’re likely to remember something (as discussed in the previous news report). However, new findings indicate that the situation is a little more complicated.
A study involving 125 younger (average age 19) and older (average age 69) adults has revealed that while younger adults showed better explicit learning, older adults were better at implicit learning. Implicit memory is our unconscious memory, which influences behavior without our awareness.
A training program designed to help older adults with MCI develop memory strategies has found that their brains were still sufficiently flexible to learn new ways to compensate for impairment in some brain regions. The study involved 30 older adults, of whom 15 had MCI. Participants’ brains were scanned 6 weeks prior to memory training, one week prior to training and one week after training.
A study involving 50 people with MS (aged 18-65), of whom half used marijuana for pain relief, has found that marijuana users performed significantly worse on tests of attention, speed of thinking, executive function and visual perception of spatial relationships between objects. Those who used marijuana were also twice as likely as non-users to be classified as globally cognitively impaired.
Following earlier research suggesting mood affects attention, a new study tries to pin down exactly what it’s affecting.
To induce different moods, participants were shown either a video of a stand-up comedy routine or an instructional video on how to install flooring. This was followed by two tests, one of working memory capacity (the Running Memory Span), during which numbers are presented through headphones at a rate of four numbers per second ending with subjects asked to recall the last six numbers in order, and one of response inhibition (the Stroop task).
Following previous research suggesting that the volume of the hippocampus was reduced in some people with chronic PTSD, a twin study indicated that this may not be simply a sign that stress has shrunk the hippocampus, but that those with a smaller hippocampus are at greater risk of PTSD. Now a new study has found that Gulf War veterans who recovered from PTSD had, on average, larger hippocampi than veterans who still suffer from PTSD. Those who recovered had hippocampi of similar size to control subjects who had never had PTSD.
A survey of 257 epileptic patients and five clinicians has revealed that while patients ranked memory loss as their second-most important concern on a list of 20 potential medical or social concerns, memory loss was ranked only 12th by the clinicians. Both groups agreed that having a seizure unexpectedly was the No. 1 concern, and there was reasonable agreement on many other issues (patients' five most frequent concerns matched the clinicians’ seven most frequent concerns), but memory was a big worry that simply didn’t come up for clinicians.
What makes one person so much better than another in picking up a new motor skill, like playing the piano or driving or typing? Brain imaging research has now revealed that one of the reasons appears to lie in the production of a brain chemical called GABA, which inhibits neurons from responding.
Comparison of young adults (mean age 24.5) and older adults (mean age 69.1) in a visual memory test involving multitasking has pinpointed the greater problems older adults have with multitasking. The study involved participants viewing a natural scene and maintaining it in mind for 14.4 seconds. In the middle of the maintenance period, an image of a face popped up and participants were asked to determine its sex and age. They were then asked to recall the original scene.