Is your doctor going to blame your cognitive problems on the stroke or look for the real problem?
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What happens to our cognitive abilities as we age? Traditionally it is
thought that age leads to a steady deterioration of brain function, but
new research in Topics in Cognitive Science argues that older brains may
take longer to process ever increasing amounts of knowledge, and this
has often been misidentified as declining capacity.
The study,
led by Dr. Michael Ramscar of the University of Tuebingen, takes a
critical look at the measures that are usually thought to show that our
cognitive abilities decline across adulthood. Instead of finding
evidence of decline, the team discovered that most standard cognitive
measures are flawed, confusing increased knowledge for declining
capacity.
Dr. Ramscar's team used computers, programmed to act as
though they were humans, to read a certain amount each day, learning
new things along the way. When the researchers let a computer 'read' a
limited amount, its performance on cognitive tests resembled that of a
young adult. However, if the same computer was exposed data which
represented a lifetime of experiences its performance looked like that
of an older adult. Often it was slower, not because its processing
capacity had declined, but because increased “experience” had caused the
computer’s database to grow, giving it more data to process, and that
processing takes time.
“What does this finding mean for our
understanding of our ageing minds, for example older adults’ increased
difficulties with word recall? These are traditionally thought to reveal
how our memory for words deteriorates with age, but Big Data adds a
twist to this idea,” said Dr. Ramscar. “Technology now allows
researchers to make quantitative estimates about the number of words an
adult can be expected to learn across a lifetime, enabling the team to
separate the challenge that increasing knowledge poses to memory from
the actual performance of memory itself.”
“Imagine someone who
knows two people’s birthdays and can recall them almost perfectly. Would
you really want to say that person has a better memory than a person
who knows the birthdays of 2000 people, but can ‘only’ match the right
person to the right birthday nine times out of ten?” asks Ramscar.
“It
is time we rethink what we mean by the aging mind before our false
assumptions result in decisions and policies that marginalize the old or
waste precious public resources to remediate problems that do not
exist,” said Topics in Cognitive Science, Editors Wayne Gray and Thomas
Hills.
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