This article lists key challenges for adult learners due to the natural cognitive decline humans experience as they age.
1. Crystallised intelligence
Consists of the knowledge and skills that have built-up from previous experiences. It is overlearned and well-practiced, such as vocabulary.
This remains intact regardless of your age and adults are better at tasks requiring this intelligence compared to younger people as this knowledge is formed from experiences.
2. Fluid intelligence
Consists of knowledge and skills that have not been accumulated from your experiences and it is less familiar, such as problem-solving. This type of intelligence declines with age so it's important to teach older people strategies to assist them for these tasks.
Attention is the ability to focus on specific stimuli. There are different types of attention:
Sustained attention: There are no age-related differences in focusing attention on a task over a period of time, for example, watching TV.
Divided attention: This consists of processing multiple stimuli or engaging in multiple tasks simultaneously. This declines with age, especially when the task is more complex. There is evidence that more practice, training and aerobic exercise can help:
Selective attention: Attending to specific stimuli in the environment whilst disregarding irrelevant stimuli, such as, trying to talk and listen to someone in a busy restaurant. Selective attention also involves switching attention.
A lot of the original evidence for age-related differences in selective attention came from the Stroop task. This task consists of participants naming the ink colour of an incongruent colour word, for example, the word "yellow" printed in blue. Performance speed declines with age so it's better to avoid overloading adult learners and allow them to fully attend to one task at a time.
It's well-known that memory is affected by aging but not all types of memory are negatively affected.
Working memory
Working memory involves temporarily holding information in your mind and simultaneously manipulating this information (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974). An example is holding numbers in your head and reorganising them in a certain way. As age increases, working memory declines. This affects learning because it can make tasks, such as, problem-solving and decision-making more difficult.
Emotional working memory
Mikels et al. (2005) found no significant difference between emotional working memory with age. Since emotional working memory does not decline, this suggests that increasing the emotional valence of information may increase memory retention in older adults.
Long-term memory
Long-term memory requires information to be retrieved but this information is not being actively maintained so the original learning could have occurred within the last minutes or many years ago. Long-term memory is important for learning as you want information to remain in your long-term memory.
Declarative (explicit) memory
Declarative memory is the conscious recollection of facts and events in your life. There are different types of declarative memory:
Semantic memory consists of general knowledge about the world, factual information and knowledge of concepts. This type of memory is not affected by age and sometimes older people are better at remembering this information compared to younger people. However, the speed of retrieval may be slower, especially for words and names but this should not interfere that much with learning.
Episodic memory is the memory for personal experiences and events that took place at a certain time and place. This type of memory is the most affected by aging. The impairment with episodic memory and other memory types may be due to the way the information is encoded, consolidated (stored) or retrieved:
Flow of encoding, consolidation and retrieval of information. Diagram from Explore: My Significant Learning
Encoding:
Consolidation:
Retrieval:
Nondeclarative (implicit) memory:
Nondeclarative memories are when there has been a change in your behaviour due to previous experiences but you have no memory of this experience, such as, remembering the words to a song. This type of memory remains stable throughout life.
Procedural memory is a type of nondeclarative memory and it's also not affected by age. It is the memory for cognitive and motor abilities which have been acquired due to practice, such as, riding a bike. This suggests that it's important for learners to practice as much as possible with new information.
Autobiographical memories are personal memories that are episodic and semantic:
Key points
These memory changes may be due to a slower processing speed, inability to divide attention and the lack of using strategies to improve learning and memory.
Processing speed is the speed cognitive processes and motor responses are performed. This declines with age and lots of cognitive processes are affected due to this. For example, Salthouse (1991) explored age-related decline in cognitive ability by testing 672 people between 20 and 84 years of age.
From the results they concluded that a decline in processing speed mediates the relationship between aging and declining cognitive ability. Therefore, older people need more teaching time because their difficulty is with learning the information adequately for recall - once they have learned the information well enough their recall is not impaired . So it may take longer to teach adults compared to younger people thus they should be given longer teaching time.
Language is made up of both types of intelligence and this ability remains intact, including vocabulary. With age, it becomes more difficult to retrieve words - it takes longer and it becomes more difficult to generate the relevant words quickly (verbal fluency).
Recalling familiar names and places (visual confrontation naming) also becomes difficult from 70 years of age.
Executive control consists of a variety of cognitive processes that are involved in selecting and engaging in behaviours appropriate for achieving certain goals, for example, planning, organising, problem-solving, management, implementation and evaluation.
Many of the age differences in cognition seem to be mediated by the decline in working memory which may be due to the decline in processing speed.
Factors linked to aging may also be partially responsible for cognitive decline:
It's important to understand age-related differences in cognitive abilities because many abilities decline but others remain stable or are even enhanced. With this information you can prepare aptly and create a class or course that suits the needs of your learners.