Several themes appear and reappear in the work presented in this Part III: (1) the question of the types and characteristics of elderly subjects, (2) theoretical process questions, and (3) an emphasis on practical everyday memory.

Three themes

1. Types and characteristics of elderly subjects. Yesavage, Lapp, and Sheikh (Chapter 31, this volume) suggest that the elderly perform poorly when using visual imagery and often are anxious when using new techniques in testing situations. These authors emphasize the roles of affect, depression, mood-specific effects, and medications in learning and memory processes. Barbara Wilson (Chapter 32, this volume) emphasizes the selection of appropriate strategies for use by particular individuals. Nadina Lincoln (Chapter 33, this volume) discusses these problems as they appear in the general hospital setting. Nick Moffat (Chapter 34, this volume) discusses them at home, where cognitive rehabilitation interacts with the unmet needs of relatives caring for the confused elderly. Apparently it is sometimes necessary to supply external aids for such people. There is growing emphasis on the potential usefulness of well-designed external aids.

I am reminded of a man who suffered from senile dementia of the Alzheimer's type. His daughter-in-law noticed him pushing a silent vacuum cleaner back and forth on a rug. “No, Bill,” she said, as she plugged the vacuum cleaner in, so that it started working. How did he interpret her saying “No”? His immediate response, anyway, was to unplug the cord and resume pushing the vacuum cleaner back and forth.

It's seven o'clock. The incessant chirping of the alarm rudely jolts you out of blissful slumber. In a seemingly reflex reaction, you grope around and silence the offender. Lying in the comfort of your bed, dreading the shock of cold floors, you begin to think. Even in your semiconscious state, you start remembering what the new day has in store: three committee meetings, class, several errands to run, a paper to write, a dentist appointment, and a very special dinner date. With a solemn promise to yourself that you won't (meaning can't) forget any of them, you finally get up and charge into the safety of a nice hot shower. During the day, you check the clock from time to time, talk to yourself about when the next appointment is, look at your calendar, and so on.

Embedded in these typical, everyday activities is a very intriguing notion: that we are aware that we need to remember things, that we tell ourselves to remember, and that we periodically check to see how we are doing. That awareness and memory are inextricably linked (Tulving, 1985) is obvious in everyday life. Unfortunately, it seems that memory researchers have been reluctant to recognize that fact (Hilgard, 1980; Miller, 1980; Neisser, 1979; Tulving, 1985). The goal of this chapter is to address this lack of concern, because the role of awareness in memory provides insights into memory development across adulthood.

Neisser's critique (1978) of the functional significance of modern theories of memory played an important part in energizing both laboratory and real-world research. His paper renewed interest in and fueled discussions of the issues of generalizability, predictability, and validity of laboratory methods and findings.

The chapters in Part I of this book have outlined the rationale and arguments underlying the debate concerned with carrying out cognitive research in the laboratory and in the real world. These chapters have clarified the how, when, and why of studying real-world or everyday cognition. This clarification of the conceptual utility of representativeness, generalizations, ecological and external validity, and functional explanations paves the way for reviews of findings on everyday cognition in Part II of this book.

What do we know about cognitive abilities in everyday life along the adult life span? I believe that there is a two-part answer to the question. On the one hand, researchers have gained substantial knowledge about everyday cognition since the 1970s. The 1978 and 1987 conferences on practical aspects of memory (Gruneberg, Morris, & Sykes, 1978) testify to the depth of interest and research. From the perspective of the adult life span, researchers have begun to examine cognitive phenomena with greater precision (Smith, 1980). Although it has not been demonstrated empirically, it has been said that the magnitudes of age differences reported in the research literature over the last three decades have shrunk.

Something very complex and at the same time very common happened to all the authors of the chapters in this book. All of them managed to arrive at the Talland memorial conference. A number of things could have stood in the way of that arrival, and if they had, the participants would never have convened to produce these chapters. One of those things is a sort of memory. To get the flavor of this sort of memory, imagine that you are going on a trip. Think for a moment about some of the many memory-related things you need to do to accomplish that. You need to remember to plan your trip, or to get someone to do that. You need to prepare your house and spouse and children and cats and office for your departure. You need to remember to wash your socks and to bring those clean socks in a wellpacked suitcase. And you need to remember when and how to return home again.

As you scan, for a moment, what you would need to remember, you may notice that much of it falls into two categories: things you remember to do (“memory for planned action”), and things you remember because you need them in order to do the things you plan to do. An example of the former is “get on the plane”; an example of the latter is “remember the way to the airport.”

Why should we take research on cognition out of the laboratory into the real world? First, let me mention some reasons that I do not find compelling.

Some bad reasons

Laboratory studies produce erroneous results

“We do not need to move to the real world, because principles and facts that have been discovered in laboratory research on cognition do not apply to real life.” Although one hears assertions to this effect, I know of almost no instances in which real-life tests of well-established principles have been carried out in a sensible way and have failed. On the other hand, there have been many examples of tests and real-world applications of principles regarding human learning and cognition that were discovered in the laboratory and have proved entirely satisfactory. Moreover, Neisser's pessimism (1978) notwithstanding, some of the principles are highly nonobvious. My own favorite example concerns the spacing of practice. This demonstrably counterintuitive finding (Melton, 1970; Rothkopf, 1963; Rothkopf & Coke, 1963) initially emerged from a long and tortuous set of experiments in the most classic and abstract verbal learning tradition. By now, literally dozens of applications to instruction, the teaching of classroom materials, and the practice of motor skills have been reported in the literature. I estimate the success-to-failure ratio as at least 10:1. Often the benefits are quite dramatic.

It is a challenge to address the practical memory needs of older individuals, because psychologists know little about the daily memory demands faced by older adults or the strategies they use to cope with these demands. Recent efforts to investigate “ecological” memory performance have been driven by the desire to maintain experimental control and the desire to examine tasks similar to those studied in the laboratory. This research has rarely been guided by any theoretical or practical evaluation of the memory needs of older adults. Rather, each investigator has identified a task that has appeared to resemble some practical memory situation; that is, it has face validity as an ecological task. In light of this dearth of theorizing or data, I am faced with the dilemma of recommending a program of practical memory training without knowing precisely what the practical memory needs of older persons might be. This review begins, therefore, with an effort to characterize the everyday memory concerns of older adults and to define strategies and tasks that appear to be good candidates for intervention. The chapter concludes with some general recommendations to guide the development of memory-training programs. These recommendations derive from the first part of the chapter, which considers what should be trained, as well as from the memorytraining literature that considers how interventions should be designed.

For approximately 100 years, psychologists have been conducting scientific research on memory. Such research has been propelled largely by laboratory procedures and data and by theories about laboratory findings. Lately, sentiment has been growing that memory scientists should be more concerned about memory as it operates in natural settings, in other words, about the ecology of memory. A strong advocate of the ecological movement is Ulric Neisser. He has been harshly critical of traditional memory research because it has contributed so little to our understanding of everyday memory (Neisser, 1878). It is not difficult to sympathize with this complaint, but the dilemma is what to do about it. Although most ecologists of memory are rather vague on how to proceed, it is evident that they would like to see more attention to memory problems of the real world and less to procedures and theories resulting from laboratory work (Hirst & Levine, 1985; Neisser, 1978, 1982a). Clearer guidelines are possible, however, if we specify the fundamental questions that memory researchers have asked in the past and show how these could be changed (and indeed already are changing) to yield a broader understanding of memory. In this chapter, I shall describe an ecological orientation that has its roots in Charles Darwin, evolutionary biology, ethology, and the functional psychology of William James. Its objective is to encourage functional explanations of memory. The approach will be illustrated with examples drawn from the current memory literature.

I consider the title of this section of the conference, “Theoretical Reasons for a Choice” (between the laboratory and everyday life), to be a bit misleading because, really, there is no necessity for choice. The issue should be considered from the perspective of adopting sampling strategies that will support the scientific generalization to be drawn: Do the sampling procedures support the inference from the particular samples chosen to the universes of interest?

Brunswikian representative design

To begin, I shall briefly describe some Brunswikian views regarding research strategies and develop these ideas within a sampling framework. Brunswik (1952, 1956) argued that we should build a science adequate to understand the behavior of organisms in their environment and should adopt research strategies appropriate to that undertaking. Because behavior takes place in a semichaotic medium that contains cues of limited trustworthiness, expressed vicariously, a research strategy different from those usually advocated will be necessary to realize this understanding. This strategy is called probabilistic functionalism; it utilizes representative design and is adequate to the task of conceptualizing and understanding complex behavior (Petrinovich, 1979). Unfortunately, it is not a simple conceptualization, nor is it easy to implement.

The Brunswikian argument can be conceived as an exercise in sampling theory. First, there is agreement between proponents of representative design and systematic design that it is essential to obtain a representative sample of subjects on which to base theoretical conclusions of general applicability.

Comprehension of spoken language involves rapid construction of meaning from a transitory acoustic signal, the complexity of which can easily be overlooked. In ordinary conversation, speech rates may average between 100 and 180 words per minute (wpm), and a speaker reading aloud can easily average over 200 wpm. In addition, the words in spoken discourse often are unclear or garbled (Pollack & Pickett, 1963). In spite of these challenges, phonemic and syntactic structures interact with semantic and contextual contraints to produce the perception of an intelligible message in “real time” (Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1980). That is, unlike reading, in which the viewer may backtrack and proceed at a comfortable rate, speech is heard at the rate produced by the speaker. Not only must this complex acoustic signal be understood phonologically at this extraordinary rate, but also the utterances must be further analyzed into the sentences and propositional representations that give rise to meaning.

Whereas older adults often suffer from deficits in auditory processing (Olsho, Harkins, & Lenhardt, 1985), it has also been argued that they have particular difficulty with tasks requiring “deeper,” more effortful processing operations (Craik & Simon, 1980) and are slower in performing many cognitive operations (Salthouse, 1980, 1982). For these reasons, it might seem surprising that older adults are not more often noticed to have trouble in understanding everyday speech (e.g., in conversation, from television or radio).

Management techniques used in hospitals will vary according to the type of hospital ward and the clinical diagnoses of the patients. Different programs are used on acute general medical wards, rehabilitation wards, and long-stay wards. Different approaches are taken according to whether an impairment is one that is likely, to some extent, to show improvement (stroke or early head injury), to remain static (longer-term head injury), or to deteriorate (multiple sclerosis and dementia). Most of the previous literature has reported studies based on rehabilitation or geriatric wards. These will be considered in this chapter, but most emphasis will be placed on approaches that might be used on general medical wards, as there have been few published reports on the training of memory in this setting.

The studies considered are those that were designed for real-life memory problems, as opposed to investigations of the ability to learn experimental material. The former studies fall into two main categories. On geriatric or long-stay wards, the main approaches used are reality orientation, environmental modification, and reminiscence therapy. In a rehabilitation setting, training in specific memory strategies, such as visual imagery (Glasgow, Zeiss, Barrera, & Lewinsohn, 1977; Wilson 1981, 1982), PQRST (Glasgow et al., 1977), and first-letter cuing (Wilson, 1982), is more often used. These strategies may be carried out with individuals or in groups (Wilson & Moffat, 1984a).

In the course of this chapter, I hope to convince the reader that research methods in cognitive psychology have a great deal to gain by adopting a view of the world based on general systems theory (GST). The study of memory should be no exception. I hope to describe what GST is, how it evolved, and what some core themes and systems functions might be.

The human is a system, I shall argue, and it is nested in social and environmental systems. Memory serves as a control for the availability and flow of information and energy with the human system and between systems, balancing and regulating stimulation. So, I shall argue, memory should be studied keeping in mind its overall purpose, that is, control of the overall daily inner and outer environments in a world in which the present copies the past to some degree.

For memory research, this implies the inclusion of several levels of everyday tasks and the broadening of research questions to include several nested systems. I hope to demonstrate through examples that research questions related to aging make more sense when framed in terms of GST ideas, such as “control of stimulation,” “compensatory strategies,” “boundary flexibility,” and “entropy,” because the systems approach is larger than most other models or approaches. I shall be emphasizing David Rubin's “why” question, although “how” and “when” will be touched on.

In Part III, we consider ways of compensating for everyday memory failures and discuss methods for improving memory. We begin by looking at some of the issues involved, continue with reports of studies designed to enhance memory in the normal elderly, and conclude by examining memory programs for those with acquired brain damage.

The opening chapter in Part III is by Lars Bäckman, of the University of Umea, Sweden. He discusses types of compensation strategies used by older adults in episodic remembering. Bäckman provides a scholarly text that suggests that although the elderly do less well on many memory tasks than younger people, they are nevertheless able to compensate for some of their memory deficits. They do this in three major ways. First, they may pick up on the support provided by experimenters. For example, scores on paired-associate learning tasks can be improved by responding positively to a tester 's prompts and cues. Second, compensation may occur through properties inherent in the task itself. Thus, for example, when elderly subjects are asked to recall a series of actions they have watched, their recall is inferior to that of younger subjects, but if the elderly subjects perform the actions themselves, the age effect is eliminated. Third, the elderly may compensate through cognitive support systems. It can be argued, for instance, that elderly chess players compensate for encoding and retrieval deficits by better global evaluation of positions.

Although the vast majority of experiments on latent inhibition have used animals as subjects, there has been increasing interest in the phenomenon as it occurs in humans. Because the normal procedures for producing latent inhibition are effective with children, but not with adults, who require a masking task, it is convenient to examine separately these two populations of subjects.

Children

The study of stimulus preexposure effects, using children as subjects, has not received much attention in the literature. Indeed, the work can be assigned almost in toto to the activities of three different laboratories. The earliest research, that of Cantor and his associates, concentrated on the effects of stimulus familiarity on reaction time (Cantor, 1969a,b). These efforts were continued by Kraut and Smothergill (e.g., Kraut, 1976; Kraut & Smothergill, 1980; Smothergill & Kraut, 1980), who started from a cognitive theoretical base (Posner, 1978; Posner & Boies, 1971). On the other hand, Lubow and his colleagues (e.g., Lubow, Alek, & Arzy, 1975; Kaniel & Lubow, 1986) have explored stimulus familiarity primarily within the context of its effects on subsequent learning. Because there is general agreement that the stimulus preexposure effect that is termed “latent inhibition” involves a learning deficit, the reaction-time studies will be omitted from this review.

Whereas the stimulus familiarization effect is based on reaction-time studies, stimulus preexposure also has decremental effects on later learning when the previously familiarized stimulus is employed as a conditioned or a discriminative stimulus, one to which new associations must be acquired.

How can one explain the latent inhibition phenomenon? Why does nonreinforced stimulus preexposure of the to-be-conditioned stimulus result in a decrement in associability to that stimulus as compared with another stimulus that has not been preexposed? Thus far, this book has provided a description of the means whereby one can produce latent inhibition, attenuate latent inhibition, and even obliterate latent inhibition. If these conditions can be divided into those that are necessary and those that are sufficient, perhaps that is explanation enough. However, researchers have not always allowed themselves the comfort of such readily attained descriptions, but have sought other explanations for this phenomenon, usually either in neurophysiology, hypothetical (Hebb, 1955) or real, or in behavior, where “explanation” means “related to other behavioral concepts and/or empirical laws.” Thus, for conceptual nervous system type explanations, writers interested in latent inhibition have appealed to habituation, particularly of the orienting response (Maltzman & Raskin, 1965; Wolff & Maltzman, 1968), and filter-type attention mechanisms (Ackil et al., 1969; Carlton & Vogel, 1967; Siegel, 1969a). More recently, as we saw in the last chapter, there has been a considerable amount of work on the real nervous system in regard to latent inhibition, with accompanying theoretical considerations.

Those inclined to find explanations within behavior theory have inspected the possibilities of conditioned inhibition (Reiss & Wagner, 1972; Rescorla, 1971) and competing or complementary responses (Lubow & Moore, 1959; Lubow et al., 1968).

Modern science has developed to such a point that there are myriad research areas, dark corners as well as bright little chambers, that are penetrated only by a knowledgeable few who happen to be working in a given field – the specialists. I would not be surprised, then, to discover that most of my colleagues, whether they label themselves psychologists, psychobiologists, behavioral scientists, or neuroscientists, do not know what “latent inhibition” is, or at best confuse the term with older research areas that are indeed its distant cousins – latent learning and conditioned inhibition. It is for these readers that I begin this treatise with a definition, as simple as it may be.

“Latent inhibition” is defined by three characteristics. One is concerned with conditions for producing it, the second with the conditions for measuring the effect, and the third with the direction of the differences between groups. More specifically, latent inhibition is the detrimental effect of passive, nonreinforced preexposure of a stimulus on the subsequent ability of an organism to form new associations to that stimulus. To demonstrate latent inhibition, one must preexpose one group of subjects to the stimulus of interest, while not giving such stimulus preexposure to a control group. In the test phase, both groups must learn to form an association between that stimulus and a new event. When the stimulus-preexposed group learns the new association to that stimulus more poorly than does the control group, we say that latent inhibition has been demonstrated.

In general, the effects of organismic variables have not been subjects of investigation in regard to latent inhibition. The few exceptions include the variables of age, sex, and handling, with the former receiving the greatest attention by far. These areas are represented by a small number of experimental investigations, and some conclusions may be reached from the controlled comparisons. In addition, however, there is a body of information that is derivable from the fact that experiments on latent inhibition have been performed in a variety of species. It is therefore possible to examine, between experiments, effects that, with considerable caution, may be attributable to species differences. Prudence is dictated by the fact that across studies there is almost complete confounding of species and testing procedures.

Age

Only two studies have looked at the effect of age on latent inhibition within the conditioned suppression paradigm (Cone, 1974; Wilson & Riccio, 1973). This, of course, is not surprising, because the basic technique, whether tube licking or bar pressing, requires a relatively mature motor system. Other procedures, such as odor preference, are more amenable to dealing with the inherent problems of testing immature organisms.

In a sketchy report that is difficult to evaluate, Cone (1974) reported an age-related latent inhibition effect in a one-trial conditioned suppression test. With rats that ranged in age from 30 to 365 days, all groups showed latent inhibition to a light CS, except the 90–120 day-old group.