Every individual as they grow and experience changes physically,
as well we change psychologically. Growth is a normal part of the human
experience, as we grow our brain changes, and when our brain changes as well as
out cognitive functions. Because each individual is unique, the changes that
are produce in the brain and the changes the individual experiences in their
cognitive is different for each individual. There are two main cognitive
functions that affect most a person aging, these are attention and memory
(Glisky, 2007).
An individual’s perception start to decline when the sensory
capacities, that are the ones that can impact the cognitive functions, advance
in a person (Glisky, 2007). Perception of the senses is how one experiences the
world and how one can identify and recognize the environment stimuli and the
behavior as the response of that stimuli (Anderson, 2010). Every individual
with their senses, sound, smell, touch, listening and taste, have a stimuli,
this stimuli makes the individual respond and act in a certain way that the
individual is use to according to the perception one has. As the individual
age, the individual start to lose the ability to remember and recognize things.
Attention is a basic cognitive process but a complex one that has
multiple sub-processes for different aspects of attention processes (Glisky,
2007). Attention is involved in almost all of the other cognitive domains in
some way or another, up until a person starts to preform automatic or habitual
behaviors. Up until the time a person is
completely tasks or behaviors that have become a habit, such as knowing how
much milk to put into a person's coffee, then attention is involved in nearly
all aspects. This means that as a person starts to age and their attention begins
to decline there are broad-reaching effects that take place in a person's
ability to function efficiently and adequately in daily life (Glisky, 2007). Of
attention divided attention has shown to have a significant decline in
performance when linked with a person's increase of age, especially when the
tasks people are being asked to complete become more complex. According to
Anderson (2010), as adults age, significant impairments become apparent on
their attentional tasks especially those requiring the person to divide or
switch attention among different tasks or multiple inputs. While older adults
tend to be slower on performance tasks then younger adults they are not
impaired by distraction being able to maintain concentration for a concentrated
period. According to Anderson (2010), older adults tend to show impairment on a
task which requires flexible control of attention, a cognitive function
associated with the frontal lobes of the brain. What this means that if a
person has to have attention divided among two or more processes or the person
needs to switch attention from one thing to another in older adults this
function may become more impaired and less easy for the older adults to
perform. A task like driving which requires the person to have attention
focused on several different things becomes difficult for the adult to perform
adequately.
Memory is another process of cognitive functioning that may become
impaired as a person gets older. According to Glisky (2007), memory is a
multidimensional cognitive construct that is believed to be a fundamental
source of age-related deficits in a variety of cognitive tasks such as
long-term memory LTM, problem-solving, language, and decision-making. All of
these tasks are listed under working memory which is a limited capacity system
that is relatively short-term and is responsible for active manipulation of
information being maintained currently in attention. This means that working memory is taking the
information that a person has at attention and processing the information into
a short limited memory while the person needs it. Tasks such as making decisions, solving
problems, and even the process of planning behaviors to achieve goals are all
tasks that may be affected by aging as a person finds it's harder to actively
manipulate and organize information in working memory. According to Glisky
(2007), aging specifically affects episodic memory, or more specifically events
or experiences from a person's past. Memories of past events though the person
believes that they are fully intact may just be general core information but
lacks in details of the event or experience that took place. Additionally,
processes like encoding and retrieval of memory, or context of information,
demands attentional resources that may be lacking. An older adult might find that they are
unable to process information into memory, having a harder time retrieving
things from memory, and are unable to process context of memory such as if they
read it somewhere or were a part of the actual event.
The aging process of a person impacts the person’s cognitive
abilities greatly. Age-related changes though not universal among every person
may affect a person’s cognitive functioning and domains greatly. Deficits and declines happen during the aging
process in individuals which accounts for the slowed or impaired processes in
older individuals. Much of the cognitive
functioning that has been studied and shows decline is in attention and memory
of individuals. The thing that a person needs to know is that memory and
attention are not unitary functions; there are multiple parts to both functions
some of which may not be affected by a person aging while others are affected.
There is still much information that needs to be studied for a better understanding
of the cognitive processes as they relate to aging.
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