Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1964. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Bibliography: l. 74-77.

The main purpose of this study was to examine some of the effects of normal aging on test performance where: (a) short-term memory was an important component (b) intellectual and psychomotor speed was involved. Six related hypotheses were investigated using a group of tests administered individually to each subject during a one hour testing period. The degree and nature of change in test performance was studied on a sample of 120 volunteers aged eleven to seventy. There were ten males and ten females in each decade group, and subjects were assigned at random to different treatments where this was necessary to avoid practice effects. Hebb's (1949, 1961) theory was used as a frame of reference, augmented by the theories of Welford (1958) and of Broadbent (1958, 1963). An attempt was made to evaluate the Maturation Degeneration Hypothesis on the basis of the experimental results, with reference to Dorken's (1958) contention that the normal effects of aging on intellectual function have often been over-emphasized. The tests were grouped into two general classes: those which measured speed of performance on familiar tasks; and those which examined the relationship between aging and interference on memory with regard to both familiar and unfamiliar tasks. The experimental results showed a tendency to follow the pattern predicted by the Maturation Degeneration Hypothesis, although analysis failed to show a statistically significant relationship between aging and performance on all of the tests. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to conclude, on the basis of these experimental results that: (l) The theoretical formulations of Hebb, Welford and Broadbent may be useful in explaining some changes in mental function which accompany advancing age. (2) Speed of performance decreases from the twenties to the sixties, although this decline is not statistically significant for all tasks involving rote repetition of familiar everyday verbal material. (3) Aging appears to have less effect than commonly supposed, on the amount of verbal and numerical material which can be grasped and retained over a short period of time under the conditions used here. (4) There was no significant relationship between aging and performance on a verbal learning test provided the recognition method was used to test retention. However, there was a significant decrease with aging and performance when tested by recall. (5) There is a relationship between aging and the effects of interference, although this relationship was found not to be statistically significant in the tasks used here. (6) Performance on a test requiring extensive reorganization of pre-existing habits declined significantly with aging which suggests that learning difficulty in older people is partly a function of the amount of interference from old habits. By and large the results were in line with expectation and tended to support Dorken's view that changes in cognitive functions with age, and in the absence of cerebral pathology, are less drastic than is commonly held to be the case. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1958. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [109]-117).

The purpose of this thesis was to investigate short-term memory disorder in elderly, psychiatric patients and to attempt to relate this disorder to the concept of "neural excitability". There is no doubt that some elderly, psychiatric patients suffer from a short-term memory deficit. Many investigators have reported that patients with diagnoses of senile psychosis or psychosis with cerebral arteriosclerosis experience serious difficulty with "initial learning" or the immediate recall of new, or at least freshly presented, stimuli. A number of studies have suggested that this short-term memory disorder may be the result of a disruption in one of the mechanisms which has been proposed to account for the ability of young, adult subjects to respond sequentially to stimuli presented simultaneously through different sensory channels. One of these mechanisms has been termed the "p system", which only passes information successively; the other, the "s system", which can contain simultaneously information from two channels. This latter mechanism is the short-term store which is required for the effective handling of simultaneously presented, dichotic stimuli, and which is apparently the defective mechanism in elderly, psychiatric patients with memory disorder. A binaural, simultaneous stimulation experiment was conducted. Two groups of 20 elderly, psychiatric patients (one with clinically ascertained memory disorder and the other without such disorder) were tested using tape-recorded digits. Within these two main groups the conditions of recall were manipulated for the purpose of examining what effect the prescription of the order of recall would have upon the ability of the patients to recall the binaural digits. Half of the subjects from each main group were told before the presentation of the digits which channel they would be required to reproduce first, and the other half was told after the presentation. The general experimental hypotheses were that, under the "before" condition, the memory-disordered subjects would have significantly greater difficulty recalling the stored digits (second channel recalled) than would the non-memory-disordered subjects; this difference would be magnified in the "after" condition. Although the results from some portions of this experiment were not fully in accord with expectation, they all were in the predicted direction. Several possibilities were advanced in an attempt to account for this failure to achieve statistical significance, and for some of the disparities between present results and those from previous studies conducted along similar lines. However, the experimental findings did lend weight to the idea that in some elderly, psychiatric patients there is a breakdown in the short-term storage system of the type proposed by previous investigators. The underlying cause for the short-term memory deficit of some elderly, psychiatric patients may be a reduction in the neural excitability involved in the short-term storage process. A current neuropsychological model proposes a two-stage process of memory functioning: reverberatory activity and permanent changes in the nervous system as a result of this activity. A second experiment was conducted using a cumulative learning paradigm with the aim of examining the efficiency of these stages in elderly, psychiatric patients. Essentially the same two groups of subjects were again tested with a list of repeated and non-repeated series of digits. The hypothesis here was that, in contrast to the control subjects, the experimental subjects would not display cumulative learning of the repeated series of digits. In supporting the experimental hypothesis, the results also indirectly reinforced the notion that elderly, memory-disordered patients suffer from a reduction in the energy of the electrical oscillations and/or an impedance of the neural network, both of which would mitigate against any structural modification based on reverberations. Although the experimental subjects in these studies all displayed a severe short-term memory dysfunction, it was suspected that they were not totally incapable of learning, provided they were given sufficient opportunity for practice. The third and final experiment in this thesis dealt with the serial learning of words which were to be recalled or recognized by the same subjects involved in the first two studies. It was expected that the memory-disordered patients would be inferior to the non-memory-disordered on both a recall and recognition task, but that both groups would show evidence of learning over a series of trials, the control group displaying the greatest amount of improvement under both conditions. The experimental results suggest that at least some learning does occur even where the patients exhibit gross memory disorder but that there is a definite limit to the amount of material which can be learned by these patients. Taken together, the results of these three experiments lend support to the notion that the memory disorder manifested by some elderly, psychiatric patients may be referable to a reduction in cerebral reverberatory activity which makes longer-term learning virtually impossible. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

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Thesis (M.A.)--University of Toronto, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 123-124).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2008. / Description based on contents viewed Feb. 11, 2009; title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 35-41).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 1999. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 86 p. : ill. (some col.) Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 62-65).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Recent work has suggested that emotion regulation of inner emotional experience requires fewer cognitive resources for older adults than for young adults (Scheibe&Blanchard-Fields, 2009). The present study investigated whether cognitive costs are reduced for various types of emotion regulation strategies or only for certain types. The suppression of emotional expression, for example, is a particularly costly strategy for young adults, but little information exists regarding its cognitive costs for older adults. Furthermore, suppression of emotional expression is not a strategy that older adults are likely to use or that they become more effective at using. By contrast, the regulation of inner emotional experience has been shown to be more effective in older adults and presents less of a cognitive cost. The present study examined the cognitive costs of regulation of inner emotional experience (to conceptually replicate previous findings) and the cognitive costs of suppression of the outer expression of emotion. The results suggest that regulating and suppressing emotions do not require the same degree of resources for older and young adults. Whereas older adults may require more resources to suppress expression of emotions than to regulate emotions, young adults appear to require more resources to regulate emotions than to suppress the expression of emotions.