A new study conducted by the scientists at the Baycrest Health Sciences' Rotman Research Institute (RRI) and the University of Toronto's Psychology Department, has discovered a unique breakthrough in helping older adults to boost their memory as much as young adults with simple distraction, reports Medical Xpress.
Memory loss is one of the major ageing factors in older adults. Scientists have now found a way to overcome the memory loss and conducted simple tests to boost memory power in older adults. With ageing, the brain tends to process both relevant and irrelevant information in the environment unintentionally, to aid memory performance, says the report.
"Older brains may be doing something very adaptive with distraction to compensate for weakening memory," said Renée Biss, lead investigator and PhD student, reports Medical Xpress. "In our study we asked whether distraction can be used to foster memory-boosting rehearsal for older adults. The answer is yes!"
The study will help in designing some interesting learning tactics for the older adults and aiding them with some related visual distraction cues around them as a part of their daily lives. This will help them remember things which the brain captures unintentionally even if those cues are not attentively looked at.
"To eliminate age-related forgetfulness across three consecutive memory experiments and help older adults perform like younger adults is dramatic and to our knowledge a totally unique finding," said Lynn Hasher, senior scientist on the study and a leading authority in attention and inhibitory functioning in younger and older adults. "Poor regulation of attention by older adults may actually have some benefits for memory."
Scientists conducted series of three experiments that included healthy young adults between the ages of 17 to 27 years old from the University of Toronto, and healthy older adults between the ages of 60 to 78 years old from the community, said the report. Both the groups were asked to memorize a list of words and asked to recall them after a short time.
Post a 15 minutes of simple attention task on pictures, both groups were given a surprise test to recall the list of words in the first experiment. During the picture task, both groups were distracted by repeating the list of words they had been given earlier.
There was no impact on young adults' memory performance with the distraction cues, however, it helped older adults in boosting their memory performance and recalling those words that were repeated as a distraction during their picture task.
"Our findings point to exciting possibilities for using strategically-placed relevant distraction as memory aids for older adults - whether it's in classroom, at home or in a long term care environment," said Biss.
The findings are published in an online journal Psychological Science.
