Keeping the Memory

Memories. It’s something everyone would like to have when making his or her way through life. However, it seems that there are too many distractions that arise during these moments when the formation of memory is attempting to be achieved.

Why is this the case? It seems as though if one were aware of a time when they wish for a memory to be captured they would have no problems blocking out anything that may distract them. A new study states that this may not be as simple as previously thought.

Conducted by the University of San Francisco California, researchers have shown that even “prior knowledge of an impending distraction does not help to improve the working memory performance of older adults.”

A common complaint in many people, notably for this particular study and namely – adults, is the decline in the performance of one’s memory. Understandably so since as you age memories are the only thing that truly ties down a person to a particular setting and time.

Drs. Theodore Zanto and Adam Gazzaley studied 21 adults aged between 60 and 80 years while they performed a working memory task, which asked the participants to carefully analyze a random sequence of pictures, which had on them a face and a scene. At a given time the participants were asked to either remember strictly the faces in the pictures or strictly the scenes from the pictures.

The participants' brain activity during the tasks was recorded using electroencephalograms (EEGs).

In other researcher findings by this laboratory it was noted that brain activity in response to distractions occurs very soon after the distraction appears – roughly within 200 milliseconds of the onset of the distraction. Given this information it was suggested that older adults might benefit from prior knowledge of the impending distraction allowing their mind to bypass the unnecessary information being thrown at them. However, the results from the study show this not to be the case.

It seems that as people age it becomes more difficult to weed out unnecessary information. The ability to record memories becomes more difficult even after one is told of distractions.