Forget me not

What happens to our minds as we age?

by Cindy Tumiel

Older adults may forget important appointments with doctors. Some may forget to take vital medication. Or they perhaps don’t remember that they left a pot heating on the stove

Aging brings changes to how the mind works, changes that can cause memory problems serious enough to undermine the ability of older adults to live independently. Rebekah Smith, an assistant professor of psychology, has turned her focus to these problems of aging. At her Cognitive Aging Lab in the College of Liberal and Fine Arts, Smith and several graduate students are working to understand what happens to the mind as people age, and, more importantly, what can be done to help older individuals perform the routine but necessary cognitive tasks that contribute to their quality of life.

“As our society is increasingly getting older, we want older adults to be able to live independently,” Smith says. “If you are going to live independently, it is important that you can remember to take your medicine; that you can remember to turn off the stove. Remembering to do things is also important for our social interactions with other people, and that is something that people often don’t think about.”

The tasks she describes are part of prospective memory, or the process of planning and then remembering to complete an intended action. Smith, who came to UTSA four years ago, recently launched a research effort aimed at understanding the workings of prospective memory.

With a $1 million federal grant from the National Institutes of Health, Smith has begun a five-year project that will compare the differences in prospective memory between younger and older adults. She is now enrolling and collecting data from volunteers in two age groups: 18-to-30 year olds and 60-plus year olds. Studies have shown there are differences in the way that memory functions in the two age groups. The project will involve as many as 1,000 volunteers and ultimately will develop and test techniques that may help older adults remember things better.

“In particular, we are interested in improving prospective memory for older adults,” she says. “That will have applied benefits for the individual and for society.”

Smith started her college career as a math major. But as she began graduate school, she discovered a love of psychology and a fascination with human memory. She was drawn to the experimental side of the field; the research arena gives her a chance to incorporate her analytical talents with a psychologist’s insights into the workings of the human mind.

“The analytic skills that are important in mathematics are also important in doing cognitive psychology,” Smith says. “It combines the two in a field where I really feel that I can make a difference.”

Smith and her graduate research assistants are using mathematical modeling to study the underlying cognitive processes that are involved in prospective memory and to develop tests that explore how younger and older people do those tasks differently.

Take the chore of buying groceries after work. The task actually incorporates several cognitive tasks, Smith explains. For openers, you have to remember that you need to do something after work. Then you need to remember when and where to stop, choosing the grocery store and not the dry cleaner, for example. Once you make it into the store, you have to remember specifically what you planned to buy.

“We are investigating how age influences each of those aspects,” says Smith. “We know there are differences between younger and older adults. What we want to understand is why those differences are there. Exactly what parts of the prospective memory task are older adults having difficulty with?

“It’s not enough to know that age changes how we do these tasks,” Smith says. “Why is that happening?

Volunteers will provide their input using assorted computer tasks that measure their performance on a battery of memory tests.

The tests take about 90 minutes and each gets progressively more challenging, as researchers ask participants to perform several mental tasks simultaneously. In one test, for example, participants are asked to answer true-false questions on a computer screen while they simultaneously try to respond to auditory cues delivered through a set of headphones.

“That is what we often are asked to do in real life,” Smith says. “We often have to try to concentrate on more than one thing at the same time.”

One of the questions she is addressing is how aging influences working memory, or how much information an individual can process at one time, and how this relates to age-related differences in prospective memory. Smith wants data that will offer detailed measurements of those differences, which will give clues about the kinds of techniques that may improve prospective memory performance.

She also wants to analyze data for subgroups of older adults, testing whether significant differences develop as people move from their 60s into their 70s and 80s. “This is a new area of interest as people live longer,” Smith says. “Are there differences between the ‘young old’ and ‘older old,’ and can we explain what they are?”

Another question is whether continued mental activity helps older adults retain prospective memory skills.

“We want to know if older adults are still working or volunteering, essentially how busy are they in their lives? If someone has to deal with more in their daily life, will they then deal better with more information in the laboratory?”

In collaboration with psychology graduate student Deborah Persyn, Smith is also studying personality differences in the younger volunteers to see how personality relates to prospective memory abilities.

“Ultimately, the goal is driving toward an understanding of how prospective memory changes; not just the cognitive aspects but finding a broader perspective on prospective memory and aging,” Smith says. “We want to develop tools that will help older adults maintain their quality of life and independence for as long as possible.”