University of California -- San Francisco research finds older brains not as nimble when switching between tasks
Not that this will necessarily make you feel any better, but “senior moments” of temporarily forgetting what you were about to do have a scientific explanation behind them.
University of California, San Francisco researchers say older people’s brains have more difficulty than younger people’s brains at switching between tasks, and that negatively impacts working memory, such as that used to retain a phone number or follow a conversation.
“Our findings suggest that the negative impact of multitasking on working memory is not necessarily a memory problem, per se, but the result of an interaction between attention and memory,” said the senior author of the study, Adam Gazzaley, UCSF associate professor of neurology, physiology and psychiatry and director of the UCSF Neuroscience Imaging Center, in a statement. Findings were reported in the online early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study compared the working memory of young men and women with an average age of 24.5 vs. older men and women with an average age of 69.1 years via a visual memory test and magnetic resonance imaging to track blood flow in participants brains across neural circuits and networks. Researchers found that when the older participants were interrupted, their brains disengaged from memory maintenance to process information about the interuption, but then could not re-engage the memory maintenance process.
“These results indicate that deficits in switching between functional brain networks underlie the impact of multitasking on working memory in older adults,” said lead author Wesley Clapp, a postdoctoral fellow in the Gazzaley lab, in a statement.
Multitasking has become such an accepted part of work and life that it has been a big topic of conversation among smartphone users, making headlines when Apple added multitasking capabilities to its iPhone software last year.
Gazzaley’s team is also looking at how software-based brain-training programs can help older people improve multitasking capabilities.
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the American Federation of Aging Research and a University of California Presidential Postdoctoral fellowship to Clapp.
