Week 15 Post 2

The section titled "control processes" in chapter 24 really grabbed my attention. I have learned about control processes before but I have never learned about control processes in late adulthood. Control processes regulate the analysis and flow of information and for many elderly individuals, these processes are impaired. Most control processes are dependent on the prefrontal cortex which may shrink with age. When making decisions, older adults rely mostly on prior knowledge, general principles, familiarity, and rules of thumb which is referred to as the top-down strategy. The top-down strategy involves deductive reasoning and intuitive thought. Intuitive thinking is quicker and older adults' decisions are generally good ones but for complex decisions, analytic thinking may be best for the elderly. The two aspects of memory are storage and retrieval. Storage refers to memories stored in the brain and the ability to produce a stored memory on demand. It is predicted that there is an issue with retrieval  which explains many deficits found in the cognitive tests of adults. Older adults have extensive vocabularies but limited fluency and they are much better at recognition than recall. In addition, they have tip-of-the-tongue forgetfulness and their spelling is much poorer than their speech. Priming is another control strategy in which a person is given a clue before being asked to remember something or when some technique is used to jog the person's memory. Hearing a word before being asked to remember it primes the brain to recall the word later.