Published: October 17, 2011
Does age affect complex decision making, for better or worse? It’s well known that certain abilities decline with advanced age — most notably processing speed — but what about that vast reservoir of decision making experience? Does that count? Does seasoned judgment trump the nimble-mindedness of youth, or the other way around?
What do you think? Wray Herbert takes looks a at What Happens To Our Decision-Making Brain As We Age over at The Huffington Post read more
Wray Herbert is the author of “On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits.” He is an award-winning journalist who has been writing about health and psychology for more than 25 years, including regular columns for Newsweek and Scientific American Mind and his popular blog, We’re Only Human.
Source: Huffington Post
Published: August 18, 2011
We make decisions all our lives—so you’d think we’d get better and better at it. Yet research has shown that younger adults are better decision makers than older ones. Some Texas psychologists, puzzled by these findings, suspected the experiments were biased toward younger brains.
So, rather than testing the ability to make decisions one at a time without regard to past or future, as earlier research did, these psychologists designed a model requiring participants to evaluate each result in order to strategize the next choice, more like decision making in the real world.
The results: The older decision makers trounced their juniors. The findings will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. [continue reading…]
The discovery of a link between genetics, age and late-onset dementia could help men identify their risk of developing the disorder later in life.
In research published in the August edition of the journal Neurology, Monash researchers Professor Kim Cornish and Dr Darren Hocking led a team which examined impulsivity, attention and working memory skills of men aged 18 to 69 years, who were all carriers.
Men who are carriers of the FMR1 (Fragile X Mental Retardation 1) gene may be at high risk of developing severe dementia as they age, despite having no obvious symptoms earlier in life.
Fragile X Syndrome is the leading inherited cause of intellectual disability and the most common known genetic cause of autism.
The FMR1 gene occurs in two stages: as a small-medium expansion (carriers) and as a large expansion. Those with the large expansion will have Fragile X Syndrome (FXS) and experience the full effects.
Approximately one in 250 women and one in 800 men will be carriers of the FMR1 gene. For many years, those who carried the gene were assumed to be unaffected by any of the challenges faced by those with FXS.
The men were tested for their ability to phase out irrelevant information as well as actively store short-term information. These core brain functions decline with late-stage dementia.
The research found that carriers of the gene who were at the upper end of the medium expansion were more likely to have problems with inhibition and remembering materials, demonstrating cognitive dementia symptoms, whereas those who had expansions just within the medium range appeared risk-free. [continue reading…]
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