Published: December 27, 2011
Image: istockphoto
oth children and the elderly have slower response times when they have to make quick decisions in some settings.
But recent research suggests that much of that slower response is a conscious choice to emphasize accuracy over speed.
In fact, healthy older people can be trained to respond faster in some decision-making tasks without hurting their accuracy – meaning their cognitive skills in this area aren’t so different from younger adults.
“Many people think that it is just natural for older people’s brains to slow down as they age, but we’re finding that isn’t always true,” said Roger Ratcliff, professor of psychology at Ohio State University and co-author of the studies.
“At least in some situations, 70-year-olds may have response times similar to those of 25-year olds.”
Ratcliff and his colleagues have been studying cognitive processes and aging in their lab for about a decade. In a new study published online this month in the journal Child Development, they extended their work to children.
Ratcliff said their results in children are what most scientists would have expected: very young children have slower response times and poorer accuracy compared to adults, and these improve as the children mature.
But the more interesting finding is that older adults don’t necessarily have slower brain processing than younger people, said Gail McKoon, professor of psychology at Ohio State and co-author of the studies.
“Older people don’t want to make any errors at all, and that causes them to slow down. We found that it is difficult to get them out of the habit, but they can with practice,” McKoon said. [continue reading…]
Published: December 12, 2011
Study Participants at Risk for Alzheimer’s Want to Know Their Potential Fate
If you had a family history of developing Alzheimer’s disease, would you take a genetic test that would give you more information about your chances?
“Definitely,” said Gloria VanAlstine, 60, and Joyce Smith, 79. The two women took a controversial genetic test of a gene called Apolipoprotein E. APOE is a susceptibility gene where certain variants have been found to significantly increase a person’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Both women have a family history of Alzheimer’s, which increases risk.
The genetic test was conducted as part of the Risk Evaluation and Education for Alzheimer’s disease Study (REVEAL), a series of clinical trials taking place at U-M School of Public Health, with other sites including Harvard University, Howard University, and the University of Pennsylvania. [continue reading…]
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…]
