I have three teenage boys. They are
about as forgetful as any human being is capable of being. They routinely forget all kinds of things
ranging from appointments, to chores, to homework assignments. With the older guys, I used to joke that when they forgot something, they werehaving a senior (in high school) moment.
Of course, the concept of the senior moment is a label that many
older people give to the situations in which they forget something. Most of us assume that our memories are going
to get worse as we get older, and so age must be the reason that we forget after
the age of 55.
It is true that there is a general cognitive
decline starting in your 20s. And your
memory will get a bit worse as you age.
But unless you have suffered brain injury, those declines are not
precipitous. Indeed, there is some
evidence that your beliefs about your memory abilities are at least as
important to your ability to remember as any changes in brain function.
An interesting study making this point was presented in a
paper by Ayanna Thomas and Stacey Dubois in the December, 2011 issue of Psychological Science.
These researchers took advantage of a strange memory phenomenon
known as the Deese Roediger McDermott effect after the researchers who
discovered and popularized it in research.
To get a sense of how this effect works, read the following list of
words slowly.
butter, food, eat, sandwich, rye, jam, milk, flour, jelly,
dough, crust, slice, wine, loaf, toast
Now, close your eyes for a second and remember as many of
the words you can. Without looking back
at the list, ask yourself, was the word sandwich
on that list? How about the word bread?
The word sandwich was indeed
on the list. But how about bread?
It actually is not on the list, but about half the people given this
list will answer that they saw the word bread.
Lists like this are constructed by taking 15 words that are
highly associated with some other word (in this case, bread). When you study the
list, the words make you think of the associate, and later you act as if you
saw that word as well.
Studies show that college students typically mis-remember
seeing the associated word about 50% of the time. The researchers speculated that if older
adults are worried that their memories get worse with age, they might be even
more likely than that to mis-remember seeing the associated word.
Participants in this study were either older adults (with a mean
age of 70) or younger adults (with a mean age of 19). They began the study by studying several
lists of words like the one I just showed you.
After that, half the participants had a paragraph read to them about
age-related declines in memory. The other
half had a paragraph read to them about psychology research unrelated to
age. The first group was expected to be
more concerned about the effects of age on memory than the second. Finally, participants saw a number of words
and were asked whether they had appeared on the lists they studied. Several of these words were the associates
that were expected to lead to false recognitions.
The younger adults were not affected by hearing about
age-related declines in memory. They
responded that they had seen the associated word about 50% of the time
regardless of what paragraph they had read to them. Older adults who heard a paragraph about
research in general also said they recognized the associated word about 50% of
the time. However, the older adults who
heard about age-related declines in memory said they recognized the associated
word about 70% of the time.
The idea is that when older adults are concerned that they
are experiencing memory problems, they do not focus as carefully on their
knowledge about where they encountered words as they do when they are not
worried about their memory. In
actuality, older adults had pretty good memory overall. They correctly recognized about 85% of the
words they had actually studied before and only said that they had seen words
that had not been studied about 10% of the time. So, older adults got worse on the memory test
just because of their concern about memory.
These findings are one more reason to stamp the concept of a
senior moment out. As you get older, worrying
about declines in memory is far more damaging to your ability to think than any
actual declines in memory ability. So
relax. When you get older, you probably
aren’t that much more forgetful than your typical teen.
