13, November 2014

Why thinking skills go down with age

If your grandparents take a long to recognise known faces from a fleeting glance, that may well signal their declining intelligence.

The slowing of simple, visual decision-making processes might be part of what underlies decline in the complex decision making that we recognise as general intelligence, says a study.

As the basic ability to make correct decisions based on brief visual impressions declines with age, so does intelligence, said Stuart Ritchie from University of Edinburgh in Britain.

"The typical person who has better-preserved complex thinking skills in older age tends to be someone who can accumulate information quickly from a fleeting glance," Ritchie added.

The evidence comes from experiments in which researchers showed 600 healthy older people very brief flashes of one of two shapes on a screen and measured the time it took each of them to reliably tell one from the other.

Participants repeated the test at ages 70, 73, and 76. The longitudinal study is among the first to test the hypothesis that the changes they observed in the measure known as "inspection time" might be related to changes in intelligence in old age.

"Since the declines are so strongly related, it might be easier under some circumstances to use inspection time to chart a participant's cognitive decline than it would be to sit them down and give them a full, complicated battery of IQ tests," Ritchie noted.

The study appeared in the journal Current Biology.

Source: www.timesofindia.com

13.11.2014

Walking could arrest memory decline

Living in a a neighbourhood that encourages walking could help the elderly stave off cognitive decline, says a new research. 

Easy-to-walk communities result in better outcomes both for physical health - (such as lower body mass and blood pressure) - and cognition (such as better memory) in the elderly, the findings showed. 

"People can walk either to get somewhere or for leisure," said Amber Watts, assistant professor of clinical psychology at the University of Kansas in the US. 

The study involved 25 people with mild Alzheimer's disease and 39 older adults without cognitive impairment. 

Older adults, health care professionals, caregivers, architects and urban planners could benefit from the findings, the researcher noted. 

"Features of a neighbourhood that encourage walking for transportation require having someplace worth walking to, like neighbours' houses, stores and parks," Watts added. 

She said neighbourhoods that inspire walking for leisure also are full of pleasant things to look at, like walking trails or shade provided by trees. 

The findings were recently presented at the Gerontological Society of America's annual meeting in Washington, DC. 

Source: www.timesofindia.com

13.11.2014

Life dosen’t gets EASIER; you just get STRONGER