Desinging for the Memory Changes in Older Adults
Saturday, March 27th, 2010As we age the performance of working memory changes. A big change that researchers have recently uncovered is that we lose the capacity to filter out irrelevant information when we try and form memories. The inability to ignore distractions leads to hyper-binding or encoding irrelevant bits of information. I covered this earlier in Hyper-Binding and Memory in Elderly.
But what is a cognitive designer to do? How can we adjust our designs to overcome this change in the performance of working memory? One approach involves making older adults aware of potential distraction before they occur. In principle this could help them focus or use metacognition to compensate. A new study just reported in Cortex, an international journal focused on cognition and the nervous system, dashes any hopes of that working.
