Healthy aging is accompanied by decrements in episodic memory and working memory. Significant efforts have therefore been made to augment episodic and working memory in healthy older adults. Two principal approaches toward memory rehabilitation adults are restorative approaches and compensatory approaches. Restorative approaches aim to repair the affected memory processes by repeated, adaptive practice (i.e., the trained task becomes more difficult as participants improve), and have focused on recollection training, associative memory training, object-location memory training, and working memory training. The majority of these restorative approaches have been proved to be efficacious, that is, participants improve on the trained task, and there is considerable evidence for maintenance of training effects weeks or months after the intervention is discontinued. Transfer of restorative training approaches has been more elusive and appears limited to other tasks relying on the same domains or processes. Compensatory approaches to memory strive to bypass the impairment by teaching people mnemonic and lifestyle strategies to bolster memory performance. Specific mnemonic strategy training approaches as well as multimodal compensatory approaches that combine strategy training with counseling about other factors that affect memory (e.g., memory self-efficacy, relaxation, exercise, and cognitive and social engagement) have demonstrated that older adults can learn new mnemonics and implement them to the benefit of memory performance, and can adjust their views and expectations about their memory to better cope with the changes that occur during healthy aging. Future work should focus on identifying the personal characteristics that predict who will benefit from training and on developing objective measures of the impact of memory rehabilitation on older adults’ everyday functioning.
Article
Memory Rehabilitation in Healthy Aging
Nicole D. Anderson
Article
Psychological Assessment of Older Persons
Jarred Gallegos, Julie Lutz, Emma Katz, and Barry Edelstein
The assessment of older adults is quite challenging in light of the many age-related physiological and metabolic changes, increased number of chronic diseases with potential psychiatric manifestations, the associated medications and their side effects, and the age-related changes in the presentation of common mental health problems and disorders. A biopsychosocial approach to assessment is particularly important for older adults due to the substantial interplay of biological, psychological, and social factors that collectively produce the clinical presentation faced by clinicians. An appreciation of age-related and non-normative changes in cognitive skills and sensory processes is particularly important both for planning the assessment process and the interpretation of findings. The assessment of older adults is unfortunately plagued by a paucity of age-appropriate assessment instruments, as most instruments have been developed with young adults. This paucity of age-appropriate assessment instruments is an impediment to reliable and valid assessment. Notwithstanding that caveat, comprehensive and valid assessment of older adults can be accomplished through an understanding of the interaction of age-related factors that influence the experience and presentation of psychiatric disorders, and an appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of the assessment instruments that are used to achieve valid and reliable assessments.
