PSY 3128 Study Guide - Winter 2018, Comprehensive Midterm Notes - Memory, Longitudinal Study, Working Memory

87 views47 pages
PSY 3128
MIDTERM EXAM
STUDY GUIDE
Fall 2018
Unlock document

This preview shows pages 1-3 of the document.
Unlock all 47 pages and 3 million more documents.

Already have an account? Log in
Unlock document

This preview shows pages 1-3 of the document.
Unlock all 47 pages and 3 million more documents.

Already have an account? Log in
Lecture 1: Aging begins at birth.
Questions that should be answered before the midterm:
i. What are the advantages and disadvantages of cross-sectional and longitudinal designs? A cross-
sectional design is faster, cheaper, and can incur data relative to aging. However, it is subject to cohort
effects where differences between age are not due to age itself but due to variances such as education or
history-graded experiences. Longitudinal designs can more accurately generate knowledge about the
progression of aging as it follows individuals over their life course. However, these designs are expensive
and take a long time before they can produce publishable data.
ii. What is the DAN-WAS trade-off? Deep and narrow information vs. wide and shallow. When
accumulating information on a particular topic, the individual
iii. What is the WEIRD problem in the social sciences? White/western, educated, industrialized, rich,
democratic. Most studies conducted are on this population so can decrease external validity to the general
population.
iv. Are you more likely to dream in REM or SWS? Dreaming occurs in all stages of sleep, however, it is
more common to dream in REM sleep.
v. What is the difference between working and episodic memory? Working memory is ideas/things you are
actively trying to keep in your mind or things that are happening to you right now. They can eventually
be encoded into long term memory. Episodic memory is a type of long term memory where it is instances
that have happened to you, or episodes. I.e. Remembering thing that happened yesterday, last week, or
last year.
Senescence: analyzing the final stages of the lifespan. An individual’s final life span may be dependent on lifestyle
factors.
A person who has experienced aging there is difficulty in the terms we use. There are always new terms developing
and
Not good apparently: codger, coot, elderly, senior; Better: aged, older adult, elders
Definitions of aging and old age:
i. Chronological: no basis in biology, age selected for retirement (65) at the early 20th century.
ii. Biological: how your vital organs are functioning, how you look.
iii. Psychological: subjective for of how you think and feel.
iv. Social: how and where I fit with other people. This could be based on where you are in your life, like
being a grandparent at 30 may make you socially old.
Biopsychosocial Perspective
i. Biological: physiological factors, genetics.
ii. Psychological: cognition, emotions, personality.
iii. Sociocultural: Social context, history, and culture.
Functional age offers advantages over chronological age as it takes into account.
Biological Age: heart rate, blood pressure, glucose levels, muscle and bone strength. Most prominently studied in the
health sciences. (ie. How are your biological systems working? How do biological functions differ between people?)
Psychological Age: functioning of psychological tests. This includes reaction time, learning ability, memory,
intelligence.
Study: Brain age predicts mortality.
- Brain derived age as a new measure of structural mortality.
- Neuroimaging data of a relatively healthy sample.
- Brain age predicted lung function, grip strength, lower fluid intelligence, etc.
The 4 Principles of Aging
1. Changes are continuous over the life span: individuals remain the same within their core personality or being
even though they go through age related changes.
2. Only the survivors grow old: people who last a long time often have specific characteristics. Therefore,
measurements of old-old populations are a particular type of person.
3. Individuality matters: while we look at a lot of averages there is a lot of deviation from the mean.
Understanding this can help us understand aging more fully. This could also give us clues into how to help
people age more effectively.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Unlock document

This preview shows pages 1-3 of the document.
Unlock all 47 pages and 3 million more documents.

Already have an account? Log in
- Should we do what the optimal aging population is doing?
- Not all old people are the same person just because they are old!
4. Normal aging is different from disease.
- People with a disease or psychiatric disorder can still be normal but we do not want to think this is
average for all populations.
Biological: bladder problems.
Psychological: can’t drive with the radio because it is too distracting.
Social: getting married at 80 is ridiculous.
Changes are continuous throughout the lifespan:
1. At what rate are you changing? Is aging continuous (a slow progression) or categorical (where you move
from one distinct stage to another.
2. Are these changes related across domains (biological, personality, etc.)
3. Do people pass through the same stages? Does everyone have a midlife crisis or the same family stages?
Should everyone have these stages?
How old you feel right now is probably not that different from your chronological age. Maybe a few years older or
younger, but this depends.
Study: People who are 70 on average feel like they are 55 (younger mind, younger spirit). However, biological age is
a bit older.
Figure: They completed a 45-minuet memory test, and then were asked how old they felt again. Subjective mental age
increased after testing (showing that they did poorly and felt bad about it). Subjective physical age continued to
decrease.
This shows that we kind of have the ability to make people feel older or younger, depending on if we put them through
memory tasks or not.
We will still put people in chronological age categories for the sake of research and being objective. These include
the following:
Young-Old 65-74
Old-old 75-84
Oldest-old 85+
Centarian 100-109
Super-centarian 110+
Only the survivors grow old: Health and lifestyle factors that shorten your life: being overweight, risky behaviors like
drinking and driving, dietary choices such as consuming high quantities of fat, being physically inactive, and smoking.
Survivors ted to avoid these 5 major events in order to live a long life.
Survivorship Bias: a very selective group within the 100+ population. Ie. If a study was looking to explore social
connectedness in 100+ population, you are measuring the effects of low cholesterol or having superior biology on
social connectedness NOT age as related to social connectedness.
Individuality Matters (figure): there are always going to be differences. There will always be older adults who are
better that young adults even at things which we would typically tie into age. (ex. Memory) The figure refers to
hippocampal matter
Volume of the hippocampus is indicative of memory.
- Within the cross-sectional study it looks like 20-40 have on average the same hippocampal volume.
- However, people start to decline at the 50s.
- There are still some individuals in later life who have better hippocampal volume that is the same as
those who are in their 20s. (I think, or is this figure cross-sectional, and some people who start really
high still decrease but end up being higher than the low end of the younger population.)
- There is a huge range of hippocampal volume even in older age.
(Volume is measured relative to the rest of the brain, not individually as brain matter differs by person.)
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Unlock document

This preview shows pages 1-3 of the document.
Unlock all 47 pages and 3 million more documents.

Already have an account? Log in

Document Summary

Questions that should be answered before the midterm: A cross- sectional design is faster, cheaper, and can incur data relative to aging. However, it is subject to cohort effects where differences between age are not due to age itself but due to variances such as education or history-graded experiences. Longitudinal designs can more accurately generate knowledge about the progression of aging as it follows individuals over their life course. However, these designs are expensive and take a long time before they can produce publishable data. Deep and narrow information vs. wide and shallow. When accumulating information on a particular topic, the individual. Most studies conducted are on this population so can decrease external validity to the general population. Dreaming occurs in all stages of sleep, however, it is more common to dream in rem sleep. Working memory is ideas/things you are actively trying to keep in your mind or things that are happening to you right now.

Get access

Grade+20% off
$8 USD/m$10 USD/m
Billed $96 USD annually
Grade+
Homework Help
Study Guides
Textbook Solutions
Class Notes
Textbook Notes
Booster Class
40 Verified Answers