{"id":675,"date":"2013-11-29T12:26:04","date_gmt":"2013-11-29T17:26:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/?p=675"},"modified":"2017-06-27T14:33:56","modified_gmt":"2017-06-27T18:33:56","slug":"aging-and-metamemory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/2013\/11\/29\/aging-and-metamemory\/","title":{"rendered":"Aging and Metamemory"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everyone has to get old, and if you aren’t old yet, you likely have an older friend or relative in your life with whom you are close. Many seniors, like my grandmother, complain that their memory is failing them in their old age. Nani forgets where she placed her keys, has trouble recalling recently-learned names, and sometimes even forgets childhood facts. It can be difficult watching someone you love lose bits and pieces of their memory, and it’s even more upsetting to hear their sadness when they talk about how much they think they’ve lost. Because of these difficulties associated with age, and because there is such a fear in our society of this inevitable course, it isn’t surprising that there is lots of incredible cognitive aging research being conducted. One of the more interesting articles recently published investigated not only memory ability in healthy older adults, but metamemory ability. <\/ins><\/p>\n

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Metamemory is an individual’s ability to assess their own memory ability. For instance, if you were to test someone on a series of historical facts and then ask them how they did, their assessment of their own performance in comparison to their actual performance would represent their metamemory ability. The closer their assessment is to their actual performance, the better their metamemory is. In 2012, researchers at the University of Chicago hoped to assess whether there were any differences between the metamemory abilities of older and younger adults. Additionally, they hoped to examine whether recall ability, that is, the ability to recall previously learned information, is somehow connected with metamemory. Without this type of self-awareness, students cannot recognize when they know or don\u2019t know test material. Similarly, in older adults with poor metamemory, \u00a0it can be extremely difficult for them to decide whether they\u2019re beginning to experience memory issues or if their ability to properly assess their own memory is declining.<\/p>\n

The researchers tested a variety of older and younger adults by exposing them to two types of images during a study phase. The first type was colored or greyscale picture and the second was words, colored in either red or blue. The researchers then tested participants’ recall ability by seeing whether they could remember and correctly identify the previously-learned words and pictures. After making each decision, participants were asked to rate their confidence in the accuracy of their answer. This confidence judgment was made using a percentage scale from 50% to 100%, with 50% representing pure chance and 100% representing certainty. The average confidence percentage was compared with the average accuracy of each participant in order to assess each participant\u2019s metamemory ability.<\/p>\n

Younger adults were better at accurately recalling objects compared to the older participants, which is to be expected, as slowed thought processes often occur with age. However, when the researchers tested metamemory, this created a potential bias because younger adults might be more confident in their test results than older adults, simply because the task was relatively easier for them. In order to minimize the deficits caused by age differences when assessing metamemory, the older adults were given a slightly easier version of the task, in which the test phase occurred more closely to the study phase than it did for the younger adults. \u00a0So, rather than studying both words and pictures at once like the younger adults, older adults were tested separately on the two categories. \u00a0Additionally, the study phase was made more difficult for younger adults by presenting them with extra information, designed to divide their attention and thereby decrease recall performance. After all of these precautions, what happened when researchers asked the participants to guess how well they felt they had performed during the task?<\/p>\n

Older adults, in addition to their slightly lower performance on recall were also less accurate in evaluating that performance. Whereas younger adults could rather easily land in the right ballpark when assessing how well or how poorly they’d done, some older adults often thought they performed much worse than they actually had, and some thought they had done much better.<\/p>\n

“Cool!” you might say, but what does this mean for my Nani, your father, or you? First, there is good news in that many healthy older adults are actually better at remembering things than they think or say they are. Sure, they might forget a name or misplace a note, but these little episodes aren’t as indicative of overall memory as our loved ones seem to think. Just as a couple of wrong answers in the experiment didn’t necessarily indicate a poor performance, a misplaced car key doesn’t necessarily mean your father is suffering from dementia. On the other hand, over estimation of memory ability in older adults could lead to underdiagnoses of memory deficits and diseases such as Alzheimer\u2019s. An important point here for many family members and healthcare professionals is that it’s important to test an older adult’s memory rather than assuming their claims that they’re ‘slipping’ or ‘doing just fine’ are accurate. There are all sort of reasons we forget things at all ages, and it’s important to realize that as we grow older, we may be losing the ability not simply to remember, but to be aware of what it is we can and can’t remember. So, next time Nani tells me her memory isn’t what it used to be, I’ll tell her that may be true, but her memory is probably better than she thinks. Then again, if she tells me she\u2019s doing just fine, I might recommend that she get a yearly test, just to be sure.<\/p>\n

Citation:<\/p>\n

Wong JT, Cramer SJ, Gallo DA. Age-related reduction of the confidence-accuracy relationship in episodic memory: Effects of recollection quality and retrieval monitoring. Psychology & Aging 2012 Dec;27(4):1053-65. doi: 10.1037\/a0027686. http:\/\/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/pubmed\/22449027\/. <\/ins><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everyone has to get old, and if you aren’t old yet, you likely have an older friend or relative in your life with whom you are close. Many seniors, like my grandmother, complain that their memory is failing them in their old age. Nani forgets where she placed her keys, has trouble recalling recently-learned names, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3477,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[40864,80215],"tags":[43341,125381],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675"}],"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\/3477"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3695,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675\/revisions\/3695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}