(April 11, 2011) Scientists at the University of California,
San Francisco (UCSF) have pinpointed a reason older adults have a harder time
multitasking than younger adults: they have more difficulty switching between
tasks at the level of brain networks.
Researchers know that
multitasking negatively affects short-term, or “working,” memory in both young
and older adults. Working memory is the capacity to hold and manipulate
information in the mind for a period of time. It is the basis of all mental
operations, from learning a friend’s telephone number, and then entering it
into a smart phone, to following the train of a conversation, to conducting
complex tasks such as reasoning, comprehension and learning.
However, anecdotal accounts of “senior
moments” – such as forgetting what one wanted to retrieve from the refrigerator
after leaving the couch – combined with scientific studies conducted at UCSF
and elsewhere indicate that the impact is greater in older people.
The current study offers insights
into what is occurring in the brain in older adults. “Our findings suggest that
the negative impact of multitasking on working memory is not necessarily a
memory problem, per se, but the result of an interaction between attention and
memory,” said the senior author of the study, Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD, UCSF
associate professor of neurology, physiology and psychiatry and director of the
UCSF Neuroscience Imaging Center.