A Study on Memory of Places in the Old Age

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In this paper, we provide discussion on memory of the aged people concerning local area and everyday environment, i.e. place memory. Because of the decline of memory as well as the physical function, people tend to suffer from mismatching problem between places and their behavior in the old age, which might cause the serious decrease of Q0L. We aim at dealing with this problem through our studies on memory in the real world.Here, we first make an effort to review the articles on the everyday memory in the field of psychology, which, unfortunately, revealed relative terra-incognita around this area. Our first outcome is systematic review into this terra-incognita. We then conducted the 2 surveys : 1) survey on the responses of aged people by looking photographs which included scenes of their local area, 2) survey on the environment of nursing homes and group homes, and cognitive errors of elderly people with dementia. From the result of the former survey (chapter 2), we found the tendency of contents of subjects' verbalization, and the relationship between place memory and reminiscences. Then, from the result of the latter survey (chapter 3), we found that some significant cognitive errors were supposed to be caused by a certain physical factors in the environment.We hope the result of the survey 1 will contribute to the improvement of local environment and care in local environment. And the survey 2 will contribute to the improvement of living in the institutional environment in old age.