Plasticity in Aging and Memory for Everyday Activities

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PROJECT SUMMARY As we age, cognitive abilities such as working memory and episodic memory decline, but semantic knowledge remains intact. This proposal will test whether older adults can leverage their intact semantic knowledge to offset the declines in working memory and episodic memory. In particular, the proposed studies will assess whether semantic knowledge improves how everyday activities are encoded. The long-term goal of this research is to identify ways in which older adults can use their intact knowledge to improve their everyday memory, make effective decisions in everyday life (e.g., decisions about healthcare and estate planning), interact with new technology, and maintain an independent lifestyle. This goal is highly relevant to the NIH core mission “to seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability.” Aim 1 of this proposal will determine how knowledge use during event encoding changes with age. Aim 2 will test a knowledge-based intervention for improving everyday memory. The proposal will use an innovative combination of behavioral oculomotor, and neuroimaging measures of event encoding to address these aims. We will assess how younger and older adults adapt their strategies when learning new information. Specifically, this project will focus on the extent to which people can learn to utilize their existing knowledge to effectively encode everyday activities. We hypothesize that semantic knowledge will improve event encoding. Further, we predict that because older adults often experience everyday memory failures, they will learn to rely on their increased knowledge base to offset these impairments. Thus, we predict that knowledge will improve everyday memory to a greater extent for older adults. Our goal of improving older adults' ability to encode and retrieve everyday activities is aligned with NIA's vision for older adults to “enjoy robust health and independence, remain physically and mentally active, and continue to make positive contributions to their families and communities.”