The impact of sleep, mood and age on so-called “working” memory, which plays an essential role in many cognitive functions, has been studied by a team of psychologists in California. Conclusions: the faculties of those who sleep well and have a happy character are better preserved.
Working memory is the part of short-term memory that temporarily stores and manages information needed for cognitive tasks, such as learning, reasoning, or comprehension. In other words, the essence of our mental and intellectual abilities. It is this memory that allows creative problem solving, mastery of language or action planning on which researchers from the University of California at Riverside have looked to study what could impact it qualitatively and quantitatively.
The older the person, the weaker and more imprecise their memory.
The results of their work have just been published by the journal of the international society of neuropsychology. They show that age has a negative impact on the quality of working memory: the older the person, the weaker and more imprecise their memory. In contrast, the ability to recall a previously experienced event, the quantitative aspect of working memory, is directly related to sleep quality and mood.
Interrelated factors
“The factors of age, sleep quality or mood are interrelated. For example, older people are more likely to have a negative mood than young adults. And poor sleep is often associated with poor mood. Our work has focused on how these factors are associated with quality and quantity, and this is the first time this has been done,” said Weiwei Zhang, assistant professor of psychology and director of the study.
Two groups of people were studied: a group of 110 college students sampled according to self-reported measures of their sleep quality and mood, and a group of 31 people aged 21 to 77 to lead the work on the link between age and memory.
Better understand the mechanisms of age-related dementia
“Better knowledge of the impact of different factors on working memory could help us better understand the mechanisms underlying age-related dementia,” the researchers point out.
Even if the populations on which their study is based are quantitatively small, they hope to have extracted elements from them from which their team can find means of action to halt the decline of memory with age.
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