published_or_final_version / abstract / Psychology / Master / Master of Philosophy

The purpose of this study was to test one theoretical explanation for elders' perceived current adequacy of everyday remembering, and the antecedent perceptions, values and beliefs, and consequent feelings related to this perception. Fourteen hypotheses, deduced from the theory of subjective forgetfulness in elders (Cromwell, 1991), tested one theoretical explanation for the relationships among: Personal Importance of Remembering, Perceived Seriousness of Forgetting, Perceived Frequency of Forgetting, Belief in a Relationship between Aging and Memory Decline, Belief in a Personal Health Risk for Memory Decline, Perceived Current Adequacy of Everyday Remembering, Distress about Current Forgetting, Concern about Future Forgetting and Self Esteem in elders. Multiple regression analysis of the data obtained from 202 community based elders, age 65 to 97, supported the assertions that perceiving self to forget frequently negatively influenced elders' judgments of their current memory adequacy and increased their distress about current forgetting. Believing that one had risk factors for memory decline influenced the current distress experienced about forgetting, and the level of concern about future memory. Present concerns about forgetting, in response to perceived frequency of forgetting and perceived risks, influenced in part the degree to which the present situation was viewed as a warning sign of potential progressive future decline. Concerns about memory and forgetting influenced elders' level of self esteem. Intriguing differences in the relationships among antecedent perceptions, values and beliefs, and consequent feelings about self were discovered between older and younger elders, and between elders who highly valued remembering and those for whom remembering was of lesser importance. Future research to expand our understanding of the subjective experience of forgetfulness in elders and potential future intervention research to increase perceived memory adequacy and decrease present and future concerns were proposed.

This study investigated quantitative and qualitative aspects of memory in three age-and-education-matched groups (1) 38 normal elderly, (2) 15 patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT), and (3) 26 depressed elderly. Three clusters of dependent variables were used to examine group differences: (1) standard psychometric (Wechsler Memory Scale logical memory and visual reproduction subtests), (2) verbal recall measures (free recall measures of primary memory, secondary memory, prior item intrusions and extra list intrusions), and (3) verbal recognition memory measures (true positive, false positive, true negative, and false negative responses). Analyses of variance, with specified contrasts, found the DAT patients to demonstrate a pervasive memory impairment affecting both the qualitative and quantitative memory indices compared to depressed and normal elderly. The depressed elderly demonstrated impairment, compared to normal elderly, on tasks requiring effortful processing. Findings support pervasive memory loss in DAT patients and do not support clear memory impairment in the present depressed sample.

The current study assessed whether the accuracy of children’s self-reports of events experienced differs as a function of age and how the question is asked. Additional factors like metamemory and distractibility were assessed. Primary-school students (M= 7.7 years) and middle-school students (M = 9.7 years) completed two different versions of an event frequency measure, two times, at one week intervals. In one of the measures of event frequency, no memory prompts were provided (uncued questionnaire condition), while in the other measure, recall categories for aiding recollections were provided (cued questionnaire condition). Participants’ self-reported event frequencies for the cued and uncued questionnaires were compared with trained observers’ event frequencies for the cued and uncued conditions. Older children reported event frequency more accurately than younger participants. Participants also reported events with greater accuracy with the aid of memory prompts than without, an effect that was especially strong among the younger children. Neither metamemory nor distractibility was accountable for the differences within age groups. The findings suggest that age-related improvements in accuracy of event frequency across the transition into adolescence may, in part, be due to improvements in the ability to recall and recount those events in the absence of memory cues. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

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The effects of exogenous estrogen administration on aspects of memory and cognition in women were examined in two studies. In Study 1, women receiving estrogen replacement therapy were compared to untreated women on four measures of verbal memory. Those receiving estrogen had significantly better scores on a measure of delayed memory for propositional material. In Study 2, women in the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) were administered either estrogen or placebo on a double-blind basis for six months. Women given estrogen showed improvement on a measure of verbal memory and spatial attention compared to the placebo controls. The combined results of these studies provide evidence that estrogen enhances aspects of verbal memory in both healthy postmenopausal women and in postmenopausal women in the early stages of AD as measured by neuropsychological tests. These effects might be mediated by actions of estrogen on neuronal morphology and physiology in brain areas important for memory and cognition.

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Relationships between the steroid hormones estradiol (E2), testosterone (T), cortisol (CRT) and dehydroepiandrosterone-sulfate (DHEAS), memory and mood were investigated in men, in women estrogen-users and non-users, and in patients with Alzheimer's Disease (AD). In Study 1, 72 year-old healthy men and women estrogen-users performed better than estrogen non-users on Forward and Total Digit Span, which test attention and short-term memory, concomitant with their higher E2 levels. The estrogen-users performed better than the men and the non-users on Delayed Selective Reminding, a test of explicit verbal memory. Men and women with higher CRT levels performed worse on several explicit verbal memory tests compared to those with lower endogenous, CRT levels. In Study 2, male patients with AD performed better than estrogen non-using women with AD on several everyday memory tests, and women estrogen-users with AD performed similarly to the men. Both the men and estrogen-users had higher levels of E2 than the non-users. AD patients with higher endogenous levels of DHEAS performed better than those with lower levels on several everyday memory tests, and AD patients with higher CRT levels were impaired on one aspect of everyday spatial memory, Route Recall. In Study 3, no differences in hormone levels between AD patients and age-matched healthy elderly controls were found. The AD patients were most severely impaired on tasks involving explicit verbal recall compared to healthy controls, and least impaired on short-term memory and concentration tasks. The AD patients reported more dysphoric mood and mental dulling symptoms than healthy age-matched controls, but they did not report feeling less positive about the future. Taken together, these results suggest that higher levels of DHEAS and E2 are related to better memory performance in both healthy elderly men and women and in patients with AD, and higher CRT levels are associated with poorer explicit verbal memory performanc

Older adults inadvertently plagiarize more than young adults (McCabe, Smith, & Parks, 2007). One current explanation proposes that this effect can be understood in terms of age-related declines in working and episodic memory (McCabe et al., 2007). The current study tested this hypothesis by placing groups of young and older adult participants under divided attention while performing within the typical experimental paradigm. Results indicated that for some measures, dividing the attention of young adults equated their performance to older adults with full attention. For other measures, older adults still produced more errors. Except for false recall, regression analyses revealed that episodic and working memory accounted for age-related variance in these plagiarism errors. The current findings provide tenuous support for the McCabe et al. (2007) hypothesis and suggest other factors may be at play.