UF Study: In some “senior moments,” elderly beat the young

April 27, 2001

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Although frustrated by “senior moments” of memory lapses, the elderly have a lifetime of knowledge that enables them to best the younger set even if they do slow down with age, says a University of Florida researcher.

“I know from my own experience that you don’t play Trivial Pursuit with an older person if you want to win,” said Lise Abrams, a UF psychology professor who has done a series of studies on elder memory. “Now if you include a speed component, they’ll have more difficulty because they do slow down with age. But in self-paced situations where they can bring to mind knowledge at their own rate, they do extremely well.”

Whether in games or real life situations, elderly memory lapses have come to be known as senior moments. But those moments depend on the game or situation, she said.

A game such as Concentration where players try to recall where they put matching cards doesn’t give the elderly the chance to use their lifetime of factual knowledge, Abrams said. But given the time to plumb their greater knowledge, senior citizens can hold their own and even perform better at some mental tasks than younger people, such as tests of vocabulary, she said.

Older people do have some common problems with memory that can be improved with a little know-how and concentration, Abrams said.

One of the most frequent complaints relates to something called the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon, the universal experience of trying to think of a word you know but can’t instantly retrieve, Abrams said. The elderly typically have more of these “tip of the tongue” experiences than young people do, she said.

“It’s one of their biggest frustrations,” she said. “They really want to know why they can’t come up with the word right away. They see it as a sign of memory failure and think they’re getting senile. They also want to know how to resolve these memory failures.”

In a study to be published in the journal Psychology and Aging, Abrams and her graduate student, Katherine White, compared 40 people between the ages of 60 and 72 with 40 between 73 and 83. They found the younger group could think of the word if primed with the initial syllable of the missing word. For instance, seeing the word “include” helped them to recall “incisor.”

The people in the “old old” group didn’t benefit like the “young old” did from seeing the first syllable, suggesting some deterioration in language skills during their late 70s and 80s, Abrams said.

The best advice for the elderly, both young and old, is to really concentrate on the sounds of the word, Abrams said. “Instead of thinking in syllables, people usually try mentally running through the letters of the alphabet, with much less success,” she said. “If you know the first letter, try to come up with the first syllable because that seems to be the key in retrieving the entire word.”

Above all, practice using language. Abrams’ studies suggest that for older adults recency of using language is key for helping memory retrieval. “We tell older people that by reading language, producing language and thinking about language, it strengthens connections to specific sounds that seem to be weaker,” she said.

In another series of studies involving more than 100 people, Abrams and her co-authors found declines in spelling for people between age 73 and 88, who made more errors than those between 60 and 71 when trying to spell words from memory. But if shown the words, they had no problem knowing whether or not they were spelled correctly, she said.

That’s because the lifetime knowledge older people acquire boosts their perception skills, while the task of having to produce speech or retrieve words from memory depends on single links to sounds or letters that can weaken over time, she said.

One useful spelling technique is to think of a word that is similar to a difficult one, thus strengthening the mental connections, Abrams said. For example, her most recent spelling study found that seeing the word “mountain” helps to spell “porcelain.”