Strategic interventions focused on attention to consistent context and self-monitoring of performance to offset age-related VSTM decline¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 5 claims (5 for) · 1 study (1 associational), q3 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 5 claims rest on one study

Description¶

The article recommends building interventions on two preserved abilities: encoding and reinstating consistent external context around to-be-remembered items, and metacognitive monitoring of trial-to-trial memory performance. It reports that context causally boosts VSTM and that metacognitive awareness predicts better precision and fewer misbinding errors, with both benefits invariant across the healthy adult age range. As the authors write, strategic interventions, focused on attention to consistent context and self-monitoring of performance, may help to offset otherwise substantial declines in VSTM performance with advancing age.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Context must be consistent between encoding and test, or learners must add their own internal context through physical or mental association with the items.

Constraints¶

• It remains to be demonstrated that older adults can proactively implement strategies to capitalize on these preserved abilities; the ability to benefit from elaborative strategies has been reported to depend on higher fluid intelligence.

Target Learners¶

• healthy older adults
• adults across the adult life span

Target Learning Goals¶

• maintaining visual short-term memory performance with advancing age

Claims¶

• Consistent visual context between sample and probe boosts all measures of VSTM performance, and the benefit is preserved across the adult age range [+W]
• Metacognitive awareness of VSTM performance becomes less accurate with age but remains well above chance across the adult life span [+W]
• Better metacognitive awareness of trial-to-trial VSTM performance is associated with lower error, higher precision, and fewer misbinding errors, but not with item capacity, and this association is invariant across age [+W]
• At low memory loads, older adults report less uncertainty than younger adults despite making larger errors, suggesting an overconfidence bias [+W]
• VSTM performance declines with advancing adult age in raw error, item capacity, precision, and misbinding, even after adjusting for sensorimotor performance [+W]

Related Strategies¶

• Mindfulness Techniques

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Daniel J. Mitchell, Cam-CAN (Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience), Rhodri Cusack. (2018). Visual Short-Term Memory Through the Lifespan: Preserved Benefits of Context and Metacognition. Psychology and Aging. https://doi.org/10.1037/pag0000265