UVa study searches for forgetfulness factors

By Aaron Lee | 978-7261
Published: August 2, 2008

Barbara Smith sometimes struggles with remembering names, even of people she knows well. She’s 77 years old and her peers have the same problem, she said.

Not a big surprise — a person’s memory fades with age, University of Virginia psychology professor Tim Salthouse said.

But Salthouse’s three decades of research on cognition — the ability to think, remember, learn, judge — suggests that age is not the lone factor contributing to memory loss.

This summer, like the last seven, Salthouse and undergraduate students are testing the cognition of hundreds of people — ranging in age from their early 20s to late 90s — at UVa’s Cognitive Aging Laboratory.

The study measures cognition by the breadth of a person’s vocabulary, memory, ability to reason, spatial orientation and mental speed.

The tests are designed to push the limits.

“Some people are perfectionists and want to do perfect on everything and it’s impossible with our tests,” Salthouse said. “If we found people who could do perfect, we would make the tests more difficult. We want to find the limits of functioning, and you have to go beyond the limits to know that you’ve reached them.”

Salthouse said he hopes his study, and others like it, eventually lead to answers about what causes cognition to deteriorate and whether there are red flags early in a person’s life that can be addressed and possibly predict or prevent dementias such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Of the 800 people being tested this year, 500 are volunteers who returned to the study after being tested in years past. Since 2001 the study has tested 3,500 different people.

Overall, the study suggests a person’s age is, at most, one-third responsible for a decline in cognition, Salthouse said. He said there are other factors, but that his study has not uncovered exactly what those are.

Some of it may be related to a person’s lifestyle, their health or how often they stimulate their minds with things like crossword puzzles, he said.

His study also suggests that people over the age of 60 generally report being happier than younger people who complete a questionnaire — that is later balanced against the test results — about their health, happiness and lifestyle.

It also suggests that men do better with the spatial tests while women do better remembering details about information they hear.

Elizabeth Grim and Therese Verkerke are two of 25 undergraduate students working for Salthouse this summer. Both said volunteers struggle most with the spatial tests — think of people matching 2-D origami instructions with the 3-D shapes they think those instructions create.

“Oh, they’re awful,” volunteer Smith said of spatial portion. “I don’t think that’s where my bent is.”

But, “I think it’s fun,” she said. “I’ll take it as a challenge.”

Salthouse said the spatial portion does frustrate some people. But adds, “We’ve had people who’ve done them and they’ve said, ‘Where can I get books to do these kinds of puzzles?’”

The $2.4 million grant that’s funding the study will carry the research through the summer of 2010, Salthouse said.