Exam 24: Seciton 1: Late Adulthood: Cognitive Development

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Control processes allow people to select which information to pay attention to and which to ignore. Without strong control processes, it becomes 1) difficult for the elderly to tune out irrelevant noise and stimuli and 2) hard to monitor more than one thing at a time (multitasking).
Inadequate control processes may also explain why many older adults have 3) extensive vocabularies (as measured by written tests) but limited fluency (when they write or speak), 4) why they are much better at recognition than recall, 5) why tip-of-the-tongue forgetfulness is common, and 6) why spelling is poorer than pronunciation. In addition, the elderly tend to 7) rely on preexisting knowledge and rules of thumb rather than logic and analysis, which causes them to 8) overemphasize personal and emotional experience.

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Almost every older adult experiences 1) decreased vision and 2) hearing. They often don't realize the extent of their sensory loss because 1) their brains fill in many of the missing sights and sounds. In addition, 2) glasses and 3) hearing aids mitigate severe sensory losses. 4) Watching lips and facial expressions assists older adults in understanding conversations. Many use 5) closed captioning to help them understand TV.
However, many older people 6) withdraw from social situations or cognitively challenging situations due to the sensory input difficulties that they experience.

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Polypharmacy occurs when multiple prescription medications and even over-the-counter supplements interact with one another to produce dementia-like symptoms. If a person is displaying confusion and/or loss of memory, the first task should be to examine the medicine cabinet. Most doctors ask their patients whether they are taking any medications, but a patient may not respond accurately or even recall all the drugs he or she is taking. A list of all the grandfather's medications and strengths should be presented to a physician so she or he can determine if polypharmacy is an issue.