To preserve their cognitive faculties, older people should decrease their time spent in front of television. Verbal memory would indeed decrease more in those who spend at least 3 and a half hours in front of the small screen.
If we knew the disastrous effects of television on children under three, we now know that it is also bad for the verbal memory seniors. This is the finding of a study by English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA) conducted from 2008 to 2009 and again from 2014 to 2015, on 3,662 seniors.
The first step for them was to answer questions about their time spent at watch television, before spending verbal memory and semantic fluency tests. The participants had to memorize lists of words in a given time, while the semantic fluency tests consisted of listing as many examples of a category (type of animal) as they could imagine. The results are clear: people who watch television for more than three and a half hours a day exhibit an average 8-10% decline in word and language memory over the years covered by the study. In comparison, the average decline among those who watch less television is 4 to 5% over the same period.
Watching television: a “passive activity”
According to the researchers, these results can be explained by the “passive” side from watching television. Indeed, if television combines dense, fragmentary and rapidly evolving sensory stimuli, we must keep in mind that it generates passivity on the part of the viewer. The researchers also suggest that watching TV could have an impact on verbal memory via “cognitive stress”. This could result from the passive-alert nature of television. More specifically, witnessing violent or suspenseful scenes would have psychological effects and degrade verbal memory.
TV is replacing healthier hobbies
It should also be taken into account that the more time seniors spend watching television, the less opportunity they have to participate in cognitively beneficial activities, such as reading, board games and cultural activities. Rather than watching television, some studies suggest that the Internet and video games have a better impact on older people: they may even preserve, or even improve, cognitive skills, simply because the older person is no longer passive. “However,” note the study’s authors, “this remains to be explored in future studies.”
.
