Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Old Age
By: YO GABBA GABBA
Attention
Attention is a basic but complex cognitive process
that has multiple sub-processes specialized for
different aspects of attentional processing. Some
form of attention is involved in virtually all other
cognitive domains, except when task performance
has become habitual or automatic. Declines in
attention can therefore have broad-reaching
effects on ones ability to function adequately and
efficiently in everyday life.
Selective Attention
Selective attention refers to the ability to attend to
some stimuli while disregarding others that are
irrelevant to the task at hand. To perform well in
these kinds of tasks, people have to select the
relevant stimulus or dimensions for processing
and ignore the irrelevant ones. Although findings
are not entirely consistent across studies and may
differ across tasks, in general older adults appear
to be slower than younger adults in responding to
the targets, but are not differentially affected by
distraction.
Divided Attention
Divided attention has usually been associated with
significant age-related declines in performance,
particularly when tasks are complex. Divided
attention tasks require the processing of two or
more sources of information or the performance
of two or more tasks at the same time. Results
suggest that older adults are more affected by the
division of attention than young adults,
particularly when the attentional demands of the
two tasks are high.
Sustained Attention
Sustained attention refers to the ability to
maintain concentration on a task over an
extended period of time. Typically, vigilance tasks
are used to measure sustained attention, in which
people must monitor the environment for a
relatively infrequent signal, such as a blip on a
radar screen. In general, older adults are not
impaired on vigilance tasks.
Attention
Older adults show significant impairments on attentional
tasks that require dividing or switching of attention among
multiple inputs or tasks. They show relative preservation of
performance on tasks that require selection of relevant
stimuli; and although they are slower than young adults,
they are not differentially impaired by distraction. They
also are able to maintain concentration for an extended
period of time. The tasks on which older adults show
impairments tend to be those that require flexible control
of attention, a cognitive function associated with the
frontal lobes.
Working Memory
Working memory is a multidimensional cognitive
construct that has been hypothesized as the
fundamental source of age-related deficits in a
variety of cognitive tasks, including long-term
memory, language, problem solving, and decisionmaking. Older adults exhibit significant deficits in
tasks that involve active manipulation,
reorganization, or integration of the contents of
working memory.
Memory
Aging principally affects episodic memory, namely memory
for specific events or experiences that occurred in the past.
Although many older adults believe that their memories
for remote events are better than their memories for
recent events, it is likely that older memories have become
more semantic or gistlike, retaining the general core
information but lacking details, particularly spatial and
temporal context. More problematic for older adults is
remembering context or source information: where or
when something was heard or read, or even whether
something actually happened or was just thought about,
what has been called reality monitoring.
Perception
Declining sensory and perceptual abilities have important
implications for the everyday lives of older adults. Hearing
loss can isolate older people, preventing them from
engaging in conversation and other social interactions.
Visual impairments can limit mobility and interact with
attentional deficits to make driving a particularly
hazardous activity.
Perception, contd
As older people develop strategies to compensate for
declining sensory abilities, the ways in which they perform
other cognitive tasks may also be altered and may be less
efficient. Retraining and practice on these tasks may help
the adjustment and improve performance.
Play Therapy
Although Play Therapy has been recognized as an
effective approach with children, few practitioners
may be aware of the research indicating that
adults can benefit from Play Therapy techniques.
Research has demonstrated that Play Therapy
techniques can be Successfully incorporated into
therapy for adult clients, especially those of old
age.