Mindful Attention to Variability in Everyday Memory

Summary

Forgetfulness is a common complaint among middle and older adults, with the vast majority of these complaints not rooted in established causes or diagnoses. The contents of these subjective cognitive complaints (SCC) include difficulty retrieving specific words (e.g., names of people or places), misplacing common items (e.g., keys or eyeglasses), and prospective memory failures (e.g., forgetting appointments and reasons for entering a room). One study found that 54% of people in a sample composed of 15,000 adults over the age of 55 reported that they had some difficulty remembering things over the past year. In the subsample composed of individuals aged 85+, this figure increased to 62%.

While some experiences of forgetting can be partially explained by age-related cognitive decline, problems with retrieval processes can be attributed to a host of other factors including stress and anxiety, lack of sleep, and side effects from medications. Even with all of these other possible aspects at play, older adults tend to attribute everyday instances of forgetting to uncontrollable factors including age. Moreover, while society tends to associate forgetting with the elderly population, young adults also report the experience of forgetting. There is reason to suspect that while older adults tend to experience more instances of forgetting than they did as younger adults, they also pay more attention to instances of forgetting, gathering evidence that they are declining. Every instance of forgetting can confirm that one is in the midst of decline. This process is a type of confirmation bias: Every time an older adult notices an instance of forgetting, he/she confirms that the self fits within the larger negative age stereotype. The present study investigates the Attention to Variability Paradigm. Specifically the participants will pay attention to how memory performance fluctuates throughout the day. Primary outcomes will be memory efficacy beliefs and memory performance on a telephone task.

Conditions

• Memory Lapse

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

High Mindfulness

Those in the "high mindfulness" group will also receive questions about their memory performance over the past 30 minutes in both the morning and evening for six days. In order to emphasize the variability in pain, participants will receive these text messages on a variable schedule. In addition, they will sent instructions every morning to pay attention to variability in their memory performance throughout the day and asked to report on how their memory performance is changing over time as a part of each text message prompt.

BEHAVIORAL

Low Mindfulness

Those in the "low mindfulness" group, who will receive receive two text messages per day (one at at 9am and one at 8pm) for six days, each prompting them to write about the activity they are currently engaged in. They will also be prompted with the 9am text to report on their memory performance over the past 30 minutes.

BEHAVIORAL

Active control

Participants in the "active control" group will receive 2 text messages per day for six days (one at 9am and one at 8pm) asking them to report on the activity they are currently engaged in.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Harvard University

  lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

BASIC_SCIENCE

Masking

SINGLE

Model

FACTORIAL

Eligibility

Min Age

65 Years

Max Age

80 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2018-08-30

Primary Completion

2019-05-08

Completion

2025-04-10

Countries

• United States

Study Locations