Memory changes: age and disorders

Memory changes: age and disorders

1. Aging

   • episodic memory processes declines the most
   • Theories
     • Domain-general
       • suggest general processes decline with age
     • Associative deficit hypothesis
       • suggest the associations/links between items weaken
       • can remember a face, but not remember where they met that person
       • younger adults will consistently outperform older adults in the "name-face associative recognition"
   • memory strategies
     • UNITIZATION
       • remembering 2 things as 1 item
   • anatomy within the brain
     • neural compensation comes with age
       • high memory older adults activate both right and left prefrontal cortices
       • low memory older adults activate ONLY right prefrontal cortex

2. Alzheimer's disease

   • neuro-degeneration that begins in medial temporal lobes
     • early stage
     • late stage
   • music can be a memory enhancer in patients w/ AD

3. semantic dementia

   • neurodegeneration
     • left anterior temporal lobe
     • deficits presented as loss of word meaning
   • impaired semantic memory, but episodic memory intact

4. amnesia

   • memory loss
     • anterograde
       • cannot learn new memories
     • retrograde
       • loss of past, personal memories before onset of amnesia
   • Korsakoff's syndrome
     • anterograde/retrograde amnesia
     • due to deficiency in thiamine (B1)
     • confabulation
       • personality changes
       • apathy
       • behavioral changes
   • infantile amnesia
     • inability to recollect early episodic memories
   • childhood amnesia
     • from 2-7 years old, few episodic memories are encoded

5. Fugue state

   • mental health issue leading to impaired access to autobiographical memory, identity, conscious awareness