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Aging, Cognition and the Environment

Lynn Hasher
The Rotman Research Institute of Baycrest Centre and
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto

Even within a single culture, older adults operate in a different environment than young adults do.  Their social and mental worlds are different, and they rely on a brain that is neuroanatomically and functionally different from that of young adults. These environmental differences affect cognition in different ways and in my lecture, I will provide some general information on aging and cognition, along with recent work from my laboratory showing how these differences impact on cognition.   I focus on two lines of work, one on circadian arousal differences associated with aging, and the second on age differences in regulation of attention and the consequences for memory and other aspects of cognition that are the product of age-related dysregulation. In this latter part of the talk, I will show both costs and benefits to cognition, that is, ways in which older adults’ performance declines because of dysregulation and ways in which performance is preserved and even enhanced as a result of dysregulation. 

References for L. Hasher Riken Institute Seminar, July 2009
(All references can be downloaded.)
See    http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/hasherlab/publications.htm

1.  For a brief introduction to Inhibitory Theory:
Hasher, L. (2007). Inhibition: Attentional Regulation in Cognition. In H. L. Roediger, III, Y. Dudai, & S. M. Fitzpatrick (Eds.). Science of Memory: Concepts. Oxford University Press.
2.  For a brief empirical paper showing consequences of reduced inhibitory regulation:
Rowe, G., Valderrama, S., Hasher, L., & Lenartowicz, A. (2006). Attention disregulation: A long -term memory benefit for implicit memory. Psychology and Aging, 21, 826-830.
3.  For an overview of research on aging and memory:
Zacks, R. T., & Hasher, L. (2006). Aging and Long Term Memory: Deficits are not Inevitable. In E. Bialystok & F. I. M. Craik (Eds.), Lifespan cognition: Mechanisms of change (pp 162-177). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
4.  For an overview of the impact of age differences in circadian arousal patterns on cognition:
Hasher, L., Goldstein, D., & May, C. P. (2005). It's about time: Circadian rhythms, memory, and aging. In C. Izawa & N. Ohta (Eds.), Human Learning and Memory: Advances in Theory and Application: The 4th Tsukuba International Conference on Memory (pp. 199-217). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.