Event Cognition Chapter 10: Development Christina Baek 14/01/2015
Growing Old How event cognition changes as a function of the natural aging process 1. Neurophysiological changes 2. Cognitive changes 3. Event cognition and aging 4. Segmentation 5. Working event model 6. Causal structure 7. Event attribute facilitation 8. Interference 9. Significance of event cognition in old age?
1. Neurophysiological changes Healthy aging can influence event cognition Atrophy Myelination of neuronal axons Branching of dendrites Decrease in blood oxygen flow in the brain Diseases prevalent in older adults eg Alzheimer’s disease Fibrillary plaques and dendritic tangles in cortex Medial temporal, frontal lobes Memory impairment, emotional effect, motor control, basic bodily functions
1. Neurophysiological changes - General Slowing Slowing of performance is one of the most pronounced cognitive changes in cognitive aging Caused by change in the CNS , not just peripheral sensory and motor Reduces accuracy and change nature of cognitive processing: Coordinating cognitive activity (timing thrown off) Forgetting intermediate representations if effective delay is increased Ability to construct event models affected as aging effects of prefrontal cortex mirroring that of prefrontal immaturity
2. Cognitive changes Decrease in working memory capacity Unable to maintain multiple pieces of information in a high availability state Create event models that are more incomplete or suboptimally structured Reduced ability to suppress irrelevant information ie Inhibitory deficit affect event cognition When updating an event model , filtering of irrelevant info and incorporation of relevant info into model can be disrupted eg reading with distraction – alternating irrelevant word Storage of irrelevant information and incorporation into associative representations . eg recall of distraction, ugly ties. But reduced information can also be a good thing ! Difficulty suppressing info from long- term memory leads to creating larger number of inferences then to more complex event models Elderly perform less well in long-term memory tasks, requiring conscious, recollective component – associated with more specific information Deficits in the ability to monitor and regulate cognitive processes. Eg confusing which two people told them a piece of info or failing to execute a command in an experimental context when a cue appears later in the study
3. Event cognition and aging Comprehension requires mental representations on 3 levels: Surface form Changes in speed processing and processing capacity Difficulty with syntactically complex or ambiguous sentences Spend less time on new concepts BUT older adults my use other mechanisms such as high level representations to compensate for online processing limitations Propositional textbase Take longer to read propositions, propositionally dense texts Impact event comprehension as slowdown in encoding of information delays access of information important to create the event model itself Remember fewer specific propositions Less efficient at organizing their mental representations of propositions Less sensitive to informational importance Initial construction of event models impaired as fail to monitor and integrate information Event model (Situation model) Use of schemas mixed, some say use more, others suggest same extent
4. Segmentation Aging affects some mechanisms related to the event segmentation theory Working memory maintenance Attentional control Access to long-term memory BUT with age comes experience, thus a larger store of relevant episodic memories and knowledge Eg Segment movies of everyday activities - Healthy older adults segmented in less normative fashion - Very mild AD patients further impaired with lower memory performance Eg Segment text or picture-based versions of stories - Elders sensitive to feature of the situation such as introduction of new characters - Younger people sensitive to the features of text itself such as introduction of new arguments Elders less normatively , less hierarchically segment activities, with poorer memory But although “noisier”, no evidence that they respond to systematically different features Use of knowledge and/or episodic memory to compensate for information-processing limitations
4. Working event model Similar spatial gradient of availability Memorize map of rooms and objects within those rooms before reading narratives describing actions of various protagonists within that space Further objects from protagonist, less available in memory, slower response time Declined working memory capacity Difficulty updating and maintaining information on different characters coming in and out of situations More sensitive to situational features than surface features Limited creation of event models as effective earlier processing at a surface level impaired
5. Casual structure Similar manner of processing causal information Functional spatial relations Encode and remember spatial relations from a text when those relations played a functional role Eg Drawing causal inferences during text comprehension of scientific expository texts Cause and effect relations were similarly processed about events Eg Causal connectivity between pairs of sentences Recall less overall from sentence pairs but sensitive to causal connectivity But age deficits not prevented with this ability Difficulty retrieving information from long-term memory Creation and imagination of fictional or future events The more complex the event model gets, elders less likely to incorporate given elements to imagined events , and retrieve relational information Trouble with planning and problem solving at more complex levels as they cannot generate more complex event models
6. Event attribute facilitation Event Horizon Model Subjects benefit when event features that are present across multiple events Similar in elders Gist of stories remembered better than details Gist more likely to be present across multiple events in story Details more isolated to a single event Force feature to be incorporated into multiple event representation by reviewing it after initial experience of event Older adults proportionally benefited more
7. Interference Need to regulate interference during memory retrieval when there are multiple, related event models Standard fan effect paradigm – assessed presence of interference Eg Memorize sentences about objects in locations Young adults and elders show interference when information referred to separate events More so for elders, ie difficulty regulating irrelevant and managing information When multiple objects are described as being in a single location No competing models, no interference observed Aging does not dramatically influence the ability to recognize that multiple, separated information may refer to the same circumstance Can be stored in a single mental representation of the whole
8. What is special about event cognition in old age? Impaired and preserved function with cognitive aging Adopt strategies to comprehend and remember events effectively Store of knowledge and memories increase and experience of comprehending events so rely heavily on event representation to solve cognitive tasks Memory at surface form, proposition and situation model levels looked at concurrently Eg Series of texts read then recognition test Elders find it hard to discriminate surface changes from old sentences (paraphrase) Successfully reject both correct and incorrect inferences Depend more on event cognition representations Why? More selective in information they attend to Rely more on prior, general world knowledge ie rely on internally available information Decreased inhibitory abilities , have active or activate a broader range of inferences Event generation depends on inference generation, so this may be more helpful in some situations
Summary Older adults can use representations and processing at the event level to compensate for difficulties in remembering information encountered earlier, at lower levels of processing
Thank you for listening!
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