developmental lecture 9 - cog functions and decline in healthy ageing and dementia

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  • Created by: Cruick96
  • Created on: 28-03-17 16:47
why is the study of normal ageing important?
increasingly aged population (long life expectancy), cognitive decline is a major health and social issue, cognitive decline can lead to dementia which is fatal so need to understand it
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how is cognitive decline a major health and social issue?
cog decline is a great source of anxiety for the elderly, lack of independence, care implications, financially and socially costly for the state, family and indiv, understanding the reasons behind decline and differences in indivs can improve wellbei
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when does gradual sensory decline begin?
from 40's onwards, more noticeable from 65 years
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how does the pupil of the eye change with age?
there is a size decrease, less sensitive to light conditions (makes difficult to adapt to dark, difficult to drive)
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what are some common problems with vision when older?
presbyopia, cataracts (change in lens), retina change, age-related macular degeneration (blurred vision greater at centre of vis field), retinitis pigmentosia (deteriation of light sens cells), optic nerve change, glaucoma (progress loss periph visio
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what is glaucoma caused by?
optic nerve damage
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what is the incidence of adults over 70 years having cataracts?
57%
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incidence of visual impairments (70+)
20%
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incidence of glaucoma (70+)
9%
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incidence of macular degeneration?
6%
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incidence of retinopathy from diabetes?
4%
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incidence of workplace eye injury?
4%
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how is hearing affected over time (age)?
hearing impairments more frequent than visual, 90% of over 65's have at least mild impairments, high frequency affected earlier than low frequency, men are more vulnerable than women
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how does ability to smell and taste decline across age?
impaired discrimination of odours (esp. pleasant ones), impaired food recognition
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what is the mini mental state examination?
complete tasks in orientation, registration, language and are given a score from this. score of 30-29 is normal cognitive ageing. 28-26 = borderline cog dysfunction, dementia may be diagnosed. 25-18 = severe dysfunction, sever dementia
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what are the tasks in orientation?
what is the date? (year, season, date, day, month) where are we? (country, county, town, hospital, floor)
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what are the tasks in registration?
name 3 objects, given a sec to say each then ask p to recall all of them. repeat until they have learned them. count and record trials. serial 7s. or spell world backwards. ask for 3 objects repeated above and give example of each
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what are the tasks in language?
name a pencil and watch. repeat following: no ifs, ands or buts. follow 3 stage command. read and obey following: close your eyes, write a sentence, copy a design
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why is it difficult to distinguish healthy and pathological ageing?
diagnostic criteria can change over time, cog impairment can sometimes hide pathology, methodological issues when conducting lifespan research can have specific limitations and advantages that may bias the outcome
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what is a longitudinal design?
same group of ps tested repeatedly over number of years
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what are the pros of longitudinal designs?
unaffected by cohort effects, changes observed can be directly linked to age, cohort effects not due to age but due to generation specific differences which may be due to education, income etc
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what are the cons of longitudinal designs?
nonrandom dropout, expensive, complex, time consuming, practice effects: experience with the testing material and procedure, time of measurement effects: environmental factors that affect ppl's performance at particular point in time but not others
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what is a cross-sectional design?
different age groups tested at same time
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what are the pros of cross-sectional designs?
identifies group differences, relatively inexpensive, quick, simple to design and conduct, no time of measurement effects (groups tested at same time), no practice effects (only tested once)
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what are the cons of cross-sectional designs?
can't measure age change, only age differences, cohort effects could be present
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what is a sequential design?
same group tested repeatedly and at each testing point a new cohort is added
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what are the pros of sequential designs?
all the pros of cross sectional and longitudinal designs
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what are the cons of sequential designs?
very complex, expensive and time consuming
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what are cattell's 2 types of intelligence?
fluid and crystalised
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what is fluid intelligence?
ability to solve novel problems and adapt in novel environments, largely hereditary
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what is crystalised intelligence?
involves application of formal knowledge, depends on culture, family, education etc, sensitive to motivation, practice, exercise
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what are some examples of testing fluid intelligence?
verbal analogies (what way are fireman and paramedic alike), remember novel associations (table-breeze), pattern creation/completion (how do u put together a set of blocks to create a new design?, which pattern completes design?)
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what are some examples of testing crystalised intelligence?
general knowledge (name the 6 past british prime ministers), vocab (meaning of word irreverant), arithmetic
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how does intelligence change in cross sectional data?
crystalised iq increases at 25, peaks at 39, plateau until 65 then declines. fluid iq increases at 25, peaks at 39 then decreases steadily then drops a lot at age 65
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how does intelligence change in longitudinal data?
crystalised increases at 25 to 53, decreases to 65, then steeper decrease. fluid increases from 25 and peaks at 39 and plateaus before steep drop at 53, even steeper drop at 65
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how does processing speed change over age?
among fluid iq tasks, those that require speeded responses show steeper decline, in cross sectional data processing speed declines linearly over the lifespan, in longitudinal studies the effect is much smaller and onsets later but is most robust
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what is the digit symbol test?
digits correspond to symbols, need to produce the symbol when given the corresponding digit
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what are the age differences in crystalised and fluid iq?
crystalised iq shows gradual increase and then largely stable, fluid iq starts to decline earlier like middle aged,
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what is attention?
the cognitive process allowing us to concentrate on specific aspects of the environment
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what is selective attention?
ability to focus on task relevant and ignore task irrelevant stimuli
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what is the visual search task for feature errors?
target differs from nontarget display as item has unique feature (ie colour), therefore target detection very efficient and reaction time is independent of number of distractor items - search primarily bottom up process of feature salience
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what is the visual search task for conjunction errors?
nontarget features similar to target (ie same colour, just slightly different shape), leading to less efficient, attention demanding search process. observer must search thru items individually, leading to pronounced increase in reaction time, top do
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what is working memory?
refers to conscious memory, ability to retain and process info online
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what is ronnland et als study on developmental trajectory of episodic and semantic memory?
sequential design, 10 age cohorts tested twice within 5 years, at second test 10 age matched cohorts also tested to control for practice effects, verbal recall for ep memory, vocab and word fluency for semantic memory
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what did the cross sectional data of ronnlund's study show?
indicate early start of episodic memory decline at 45 years, semantic stability at 55 yrs, semantic memory preserved for longer than ep
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what did the longitudinal data of ronnlund's study show?
episodic memory decline starts at 65 yrs, semantic memory increases until age 60, then gradual decline, semantic memory preserved for longer than episodic
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what was ronnlund & nilsson's study?
cohort effects in memory and cognition, follow up from ronnlunds study, 4 different age groups tested once at each of 4 times, recall and recognition, semantic memory (vocab and word fluency) - all increase over cohorts
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how does semantic knowledge change over time?
slight increases until later in life and is resistant to some forms of dementia
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what is recollection?
supports ability to remember episodes including contextual and associative details, assessed with tests of recall, associative recognition, source memory and remember responses (R/K paradigm)
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what is familiarity?
mediates our sense of familiarity, feeling that something has been experience before in absence of addtional info, assessed partially in tests of recognition and know responses in r/k paradigm
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how does recollection change over age?
disproportionately impaired in ageing, may be due to encoding deficit (older people do not encode as many episodic details as younger people, could cause higher rates of false memory - issue with familiarity
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is familiarity normal?
if familiarity present in recollection could be familiarity deficit, if familiarity and recollection are mutually exclusive then familiarity is preserved in old age.impaired recollection and preserved familiarity can help explain recall is more affec
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what are the effects of ageing on priming?
most indivs show no difference between old and young ps but meta-analytic studies indicate mild, age related impairment. not clear whether impairment is real tho = some priming tasks affected by explicit memory, early stages of dementia?
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how does the brain change with age?
reduction in brain volume, increase in ventricular size, reductions in gray matter, reductions in white matter
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why are there reductions in gray matter over age?
lower synaptic densities in older adults (NOT cell death). neuronal cells are involved in info processing. lower synaptic densities suggest reduced communication across neurons
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what do reductions in white matter over age show?
(neuronal axons covered in myelin). suggest more sluggish transmission of signal across length of neuronal axon
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what is reduction in white matter associated with?
white matter integrity associated with processing speed. age-related degradation of white matter correlates significantly with processing speed deficits in older adults
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how is the frontostriatal system affected by cognitive ageing?
volumetric reduction (mainly reduced synaptic density) starts from 20 and is linear, reduction in nt's dopamine and serotonin (vital for normal functioning of frontalstriatal system),
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what are the prefrontal cortex and striatum involved in?
sensitivity to working memory demands, control of interference, memory encoding and retrieval, decision making (response selection, inhibition of competing responses, switching between responses), attention
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what are the dopamine effects of cognitive ageing?
ageing and dopamine levels associated with cognitive performance in episodic memory and executive tasks. levels of dopamine concentration in striatum better predictors of performance than age - most variance explained by chronological age couldbe dop
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what is the compensation hypothesis?
reduced asymmetrical activity (more bilateral) related to attempts to counteract cog decline.
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what is an example of the compensation hypothesis?
patients with unilateral brain damage often show reduced bilateral asymmetry - functions of damaged hemisphere only taken up by non affected and non dominant hemisphere
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what is the dedifferentiation hypothesis?
reduced asymmetrical activity (more bilateral) related directly to cog decline. ageing affects the ability of elderly to engage specialised functional networks
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what is cabeza et als study on reduced hemispheric asymmetry and cog ageing?
tested young, high functioning and low function old in source memory task (was a studied word presented visually or auditory), low function old showed unilateral activity (not efficient as perform worse), high func old showed more bilateral activity
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what did cabeza et al's study show?
compensation account of reduced hemispheric asymmetry
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