In today’s busy society where many people are trying to juggle family, work and social life with the distraction of electronic social media the idea of improving memory has gained interest among aging adults. This interest increases when that improvement can come through games that can be played on a phone or tablet device. There are many companies who have produced apps that promise the player will have improvements in their memory, attention, problem solving skills and other cognitive skills. According to an American Psychological Association article (Wier, 2014) the brain-health industry who creates and markets these games showed over $1 billion in revenues in 2012.
However, despite the claims and profits earned by these companies there is still a question of whether or not these brain games can actually help improve cognitive skills. As we age our ability to multi-task becomes more of a challenge, common items can be easily misplaced, names are forgotten and many other memory tasks decline; this is a normal part of an aging brain. The hope of the brain training companies is that the games will help to improve processing speeds and that will in turn improve other cognitive areas. Glenn Smith, PhD, a neuropsychologist at the Mayo Clinic and a member of the ABA Committee on Aging conducted a study using adults over 65 years of age to see if a computerized brain training program would show improvements in memory and attention. For eight weeks the participants of this study either watched educational videos or practiced computerized exercises designed to improve the speed and accuracy of auditory information processing. After the eight week study the group who were assigned to the computer exercises did show a significant improvement in memory tests and attention, as well as, reporting a reduction in difficulties in everyday life that were due to memory loss. The study also found that the participants had kept the processing speed benefits even after three months of no training but had other cognitive domains had decreased over the time.
In another study by National Institutes of Health, researchers, George Willis, PhD of John Hopkins University and Karlene Ball, PhD of the University of Alabama at Birmingham found the same type of results in a study using 2,800 older adults and a 10 year follow up. In this study the adults were randomly assigned training for either memory, reasoning or processing speed. The study showed that after 10-hour training sessions over five to six weeks the participants had an improvement in the cognitive ability they were trained in and they had fewer difficulties with everyday tasks. However, those trained for memory improvement showed smaller effects over time. This is believed to be due to the fact the brain cells become less placid as a person ages.
While there is much debate about how much these games truly help and there is still much to learn there are positive studies that can give hope to aging adults who find difficulties in everyday tasks that require cognitive skills. Not all games and apps have been studied for their effectiveness and the user must be sure they are challenging, not all fun and games, if they want to see cognitive improvement. However, with careful consideration and effort by the user positive outcomes can be obtained.
Works Cited
Weir, K. (2014, October). Mind Games. Retrieved from American Psychological Association: http://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/10/mind-games.aspx

While reading about long term memory and short term memory I began to think about the children I work with and the difficulties they have with both. I work with special needs pre-school and pre-k students with developmental delays who often cannot recall what was just said to them a few minutes before. For example, I have been working with a little boy on learning his colors, right now we are focusing on the color orange. It has been troubling me that after working on the color for over a week he is still unable to identify it, he does not have any known vision problems and this memory problem extents past just remembering colors. With this in thought and reading about the process of putting things in long term memory I began to wonder about different environmental causes of these delays. The children in my program are tested for lead levels in the blood and often these levels come back high and high lead levels have been proven to cause learning and memory difficulties. This led me to research memory problems in children who show high levels of lead in the blood. Even though the EPA has worked to remove lead from paints, toys and other places a child may be exposed and it seems as though it should no longer be a problem exposure is still a common occurrence today.

According to a recent article on the CBS Detroit web site lead is still a problem for children. Governor Rick Snyder recently approved over $9 million dollars after finding that there was a contamination of lead in some schools and households water supply when the supply was switched from Detroit to the Flint River water. (CBS Detroit, Associated Press, 2015) This is just one example of the fact that lead poisoning is still a problem in our society today. Another example is children in who live in older or historic homes where the lead based paint has not been covered or has become exposed. This is often a problem for children who live in low income areas but it also happened to a child I worked with who lived in an upper income area but in a historic home.

In 2000, John Hopkins School of Public Heath offers an explanation of the damage caused by lead exposure to the brain through a three part study using rat littermates. (John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 2000) In one part of the study animals were taught to find a hidden platform under opaque water; one group of animals had no lead poisoning while the other group had lead poisoning. The group without the lead in their system were significantly slower in learning to find the platform showing a lowered ability to learn a new skill. Another part of this study also using rat littermates measured the responsiveness of brain cells to a stimulus. This study looked at the phenomenon of the strengthening of the synapses between neurons in the hippocampus during times of learning by measuring how well the neurons communicate in order to form a neural pathway. In the study the rats with no lead poisoning the neurons worked smoothly as expected conversely, in the rats with lead poisoning the neurons were not able to establish strong links with each other while learning.

These studies show how lead exposure and memory are correlated and the importance of to continuing to finding and remove lead contaminants. Lead poisoning is not often heard about in the news like it has been in the past but lead exposure is still a problem today and continues to cause learning disabilities in children.  While there are many reasons children have learning disabilities continuing to remove lead from the environment will reduce at least some of these problems.

Works Cited

CBS Detroit, Associated Press. (2015, October 15). ‘This Was Preventable’ Says Doctor About Lead Poisoning Of Hundreds Of Children In Flint. Retrieved from CBS Detroit: http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2015/10/15/this-was-preventable-says-doctor-about-lead-poisoning-of-hundreds-of-children-in-flint/

John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. (2000, August 3). Scientists Discover How Lead Changes the Brain to Impair Learning and Memory. Retrieved from John Hopkins: http://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2000/lead-change.html

Recently while I hurried to cleaning up the kitchen before leaving for work I moved to pick up a covered cup that I believed was full of coffee to move it out of my way, much to my surprise it was actually an identical cup that was empty. Since I believed the that cup was full I grasped and lifted it with the amount of force that would have been required to lift a full cup, however, since the cup was empty I instead lifted the cup with too much force and tossed it into the air instead. While I was quite grateful that the cup was actually empty and I did not make a huge mess this made me think of the interaction between perception and action.
This incidence is an example of perception which our text defines as a conscious experience that is the result of the stimulation of the senses. (Goldstien, 2011) I first perceived the cup sitting on the counter and then recognized it as my coffee cup. This perception would have come from the information I would have gained from the energy carried through my environment. The receptors in my eyes detected the amount of light coming from the cup, counter and surrounding objects which would have been changed into action potentials and carried to the occipital lobe of my brain. This process allowed me to perceive the cup sitting on my counter and is an example of bottom-up processing.
After recognizing the cup I had to take an action to lift it from the counter; this shows how perception and action have to interact. The movement required me to identify the cup from the other objects on the counter, such as my lunch bag and water bottle. After I had identified the cup I needed to recognize its location on the counter, next to the sink. I then had to reach out to the right spot, grasp the cup and lift it with the correct amount of force or what I believed to be the correct amount of force. The error in my force could be attributed to top-down processing being incorrect.
Top-down or knowledge based processing as defined by the text as the processing that involves a person’s knowledge or expectation of the environment. (Goldstien, 2011) My knowledge of context would have been the fact I was in the kitchen, I had filled a cup of coffee earlier in a cup that looked like the one I was looking at and expected it to be heavier than a cup that was empty. I also had prior knowledge of how heavy a full coffee cup should be and how I should adjust my force accordingly.
In conclusion my perception of the coffee cup sitting on the counter involved both bottom- up and top-down processing. Those processing working together let me know that there was a cup on my counter where to reach in order to grasp it and how much force I should apply in order to lift it. Unfortunately, my top-down processing was incorrect leading me to lift the cup with too much force causing me to toss it into the air.
Works Cited
Goldstien, B. E. (2011). Cognitive Psychology. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.