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

Lecture 3: Biological Aging (Continued) & Attention

September 26, 2007

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?

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).

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.

Review: The Neuron

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?

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

Arthritis

• Osteoarthritis vs. Rheumatoid arthritis

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Adherence to Treatment

Research ProposalObjectives1. To expand your knowledge of aging by

focusing on an area that is of particular interest to you.

2. To further develop your skills as a critical reader of psychological research.

3. To reflect on methodological techniques used in aging research.

4. To develop your scientific writing skills.

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.

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 .

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.

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

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.

Example of OutlineGoal: 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.

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.

• 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.

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.

Sensory Memory

Short-Term Memory

Long-Term Memory

External

Stimuli

Initial

ProcessingR

etrieval

Elaboration and

encoding

Rehearsal

Response

Forgetting

Forgetting

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.

Visual Search

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…