Have you ever had a moment in which your mother forgot where she had put her phone, which she says she was just using it a minute ago? Or have you ever walked out of a store empty handed because you couldn\u2019t remember precisely what it was that you were going to buy? I have.<\/p>\n
Such forgetting occurs more frequently among older adults (60 -78yrs old) than among younger adults (17 \u2013 27yrs old). In other words, older adults forget more often than younger adults. In addition, older adults are also more easily distracted. For example, when my dad once turned on a television while my grandma and I had a conversation, grandma got distracted by the show on television. She then forgot that she was in a conversation just a moment ago and started watching the show with my dad. \u00a0At moments like this, I could not stop wondering why can\u2019t my grandmother just ignore the television like I do.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Well, ignoring distraction is not as easy as it sounds for older adults. Like this small anecdote I just provided, older adults cannot help but get easily distracted even by a small, irrelevant stimulus. This is because as humans age, we gradually lose the ability to control attention thus become more vulnerable to distraction, which shifts our attention from one task to the other, than we were at younger age. Unable to ignore distraction by choice can sometimes be quite frustrating. But recent research conducted by Renee K. Bliss et al. (2013) on effects of distraction in forgetting suggests that distraction can benefit older adults.<\/p>\n
In this study, a group of older adults and a group of younger adults studied a list of words and were given a memory test after 15 minutes interval in which all participants performed a picture identification task. In the identification task, series of pictures was presented and the participants had to indicate if consecutive pictures were identical. All pictures contained distractors that included words from the studied list, words not from the studied list, and non-word syllables.<\/p>\n
Results of this study found that older adults performed worse than younger adults in the memory test. However, when tested on the words that appeared as distractors in picture identification task, older adults\u2019 performance was significantly better than their performance on memory test that tested the words that did not appear as distractors. In the test where they were tested on words that appeared as distractors, older adults\u2019 performance was almost equally to younger adults\u2019. Such memory improvement when studied words appeared as distractor did not occur to younger adults. So, how did this happen?<\/p>\n
The secret lies in older adults\u2019 inability to easily ignore distraction. Unable to ignore distraction easily, during the picture identification task, older adults got distracted by the words from studied list. This distraction then served as an opportunity to re-study the words. On the other hand, because younger adults could easily ignore distraction, they lost the opportunity to re-study the words, thus not benefiting from the distraction. It can then be thought that distractions can reduce forgetting in older adults because they can improve memory.<\/p>\n
Now you know that distraction can reduce forgetting in older adults, you can apply this new knowledge in real life. As a simple technique to reduce forgetting in an elder family member, I suggest that you write down important events, such as doctor\u2019s appointment, on a note. You can then stick the note on places like a refrigerator where your grandmother or grandfather can see while walking into the kitchen. Because it is not easy for them to ignore distractions like the note on the refrigerator, your grandparent will notice the note and be reminded of the important event on the note. Such application of the study will reduce frustrations caused by forgetting.<\/p>\n
Reference:<\/p>\n
Bliss, R. K., Ngo, K. W. J., Hasher, L., Campbell, K. L., & Rowe, G. (2013). Distraction Can Reduce Age-Related Forgetting. Psychological Science<\/i>, 24(4), 448-455.<\/p>\n
Doi: 10.1177\/0956797612457386<\/p>\n
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Have you ever had a moment in which your mother forgot where she had put her phone, which she says she was just using it a minute ago? Or have you ever walked out of a store empty handed because you couldn\u2019t remember precisely what it was that you were going to buy? I have. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5846,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[40864,80216,80215],"tags":[130357],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5846"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":926,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions\/926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}