The study suggests that problems processing everyday events may be the result of age-related atrophy to a part of the brain called the medial temporal lobe (MTL).<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you think back on what you did yesterday, you don\u2019t just press \u2018play\u2019 and watch a continuous stream of 24 hours,<\/strong>\u201d says psychological scientist Heather Bailey of Washington University in St. Louis, who led the study. \u201cYour brain naturally chunks the events in your day into discrete parts.\u201d<\/p>\n Bailey and her colleagues\u00a0hypothesized that older adults may have difficulty with memory for everyday events because they don\u2019t segment them in the same way as they\u2019re happening.<\/p>\n In the study, older adults \u2014 some of whom had Alzheimer\u2019s type dementia \u2014 watched short movies of people doing everyday tasks, such as a woman making breakfast or a man building a Lego ship.<\/strong> They were told to separate the movie into chunks by pressing a button whenever they thought one part of the activity in the movie was ending and a new part was beginning.<\/p>\n Afterward, the researchers asked the older adults to recall what happened in the movie. They also measured the size of the older adults\u2019 MTL using structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).<\/p>\n \u201cThe older adults who showed atrophy in the MTL weren\u2019t as good at remembering the everyday activities, and they weren\u2019t as good at segmenting and chunking the events as they were happening,<\/strong>\u201d says Bailey. \u201cMTL size accounted for a huge portion of the relationship that we saw between participants\u2019 ability to segment and their memory for the events.\u201d<\/p>\n These findings suggest that the characteristic forgetfulness of the aging mind isn\u2019t just a problem with recalling memories later, but also with how we view and chunk events as they unfold, a process that depends on MTL functioning.<\/p>\n In light of this, focusing on how to better form new memories may be one way to improve older adults\u2019 memory for everyday events, even for those adults who have clinical diagnoses like Alzheimer\u2019s<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \u201cAlzheimer\u2019s disease attacks the MTL in the early stages of the disease,\u201d says Bailey. \u201cBut even with MTL atrophy you may be able to train people to chunk better, which might help them to remember their everyday activities better, too.\u201d<\/p>\n As part of their future research, Bailey and colleagues hope to further investigate the link between event perception and memory to see if they can combat memory impairments in older adults<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Co-authors on the research include Jeffrey M. Zacks and Denise Head of Washington University in St. Louis; David Z. Hambrick and Rose T. Zacks of Michigan State University; Christopher A. Kurby and Jesse Q. Sargent of Francis Marion University.<\/p>\n This research was supported by National Institutes of Health Grants R01 AG031150 and F32 AG039162; and National Institute on Aging Grants P50 AG05681, P01 AG03991, and P01 AG26276.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Association for Psychological Science press release: Some memory problems common to older adults may stem from an inability to segment daily life into discrete experiences, according to a… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[321,4,6],"tags":[42],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12899"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12899"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13163,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12899\/revisions\/13163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"mental](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/mental-health.jpg\")
Some memory problems common to older adults may stem from an inability to segment daily life into discrete experiences<\/strong>, according to a new study published in Psychological Science<\/em>, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.<\/p>\n