Leveraging Older Adults' Social Goals

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

Healthy aging is associated with structural and functional changes in the brain, resulting in memory declines. Unfortunately, the problem is made worse by older adults' failure to use effortful strategies like elaboration (i.e., relating new information to knowledge already stored in memory). While older adults can learn mnemonics (e.g., method of loci), they do not apply them in their everyday lives. In fact, they often avoid memory retrieval altogether when they can rely on an external aid instead. Critically, this retrieval reluctance may reflect incompatibilities between strategies provided by researchers and older adults' social goals. According to socioemotional selectivity theory, values and goals shift as people near the end of the lifespan, with the result that older adults preferentially attend to positive information, spend time with close friends and family, and prefer sharing their knowledge with others to learning new things. My focus is on the last preference, namely older adults' desire to share information with others, given that this behavior maps onto known mnemonic strategies. I will investigate whether the expectation of sharing information boosts older adults' later memory performance (Aim 1), lowers their subjective ages (Aim 2), and encourages them to rely on their own memories (Aim 3). Compared to intentional memory control conditions, subjects in experimental conditions will expect to explain complex processes to others (Experiment 1) or introduce people (Experiment 2). Expecting to share information should increase elaborative processing, boosting memory and making older adults feel younger. A third experiment will examine whether the expectation to share information reduces later reliance on an external memory aid. To encourage use of the information-sharing strategy beyond the lab, older adults will apply it strategy to other everyday memory problems (e.g., remembering a doctor's instructions) before leaving the lab, and will receive email reminders about the strategy, with the goal of increasing usage of the strategy in everyday life (as measured two months later). In short, tying learning to social goals offers a practical solution to older adults' memory problems: The strategy maps onto their natural tendency to share information, meaning it will be easy to teach and implement, inexpensive, and applicable in a wide range of situations, with the ultimate goal of improving memory.