Using Cognitive Offloading to Mitigate Age-Related Declines in Prospective Memory

PROJECT SUMMARY
With an increasing aging population showing memory declines, many of which remain untreatable, finding ways
to reduce prospective memory failures is critical for healthy aging. Prospective memory is necessary for
maintaining independence with increased age and failures of prospective memory are associated with a variety
of health consequences and difficulties in daily activities. For example, over 55% of older adults do not adhere
to medication instructions, leading to the annual hospitalization of over 200,000 older adults due to adverse drug
reactions and billions of dollars annually in avoidable direct healthcare costs. Offloading information onto external
sources, such as setting an alarm to take medication, provides an easy and effective means to mitigate age-
related prospective memory declines. However, a lack of basic knowledge about the cognitive and metacognitive
processes underlying offloading decisions presents barriers to effective implementation. The purpose of this
proposal is to address these gaps in knowledge by examining the role of offloading during prospective memory
encoding, storage, and retrieval. This will be accomplished by combining behavioral and physiological (pupillary)
measures to examine how and when age-related breakdowns in prospective memory occur (Aim 1) and
examining how strategy training can be used to ameliorate age declines in remembering (Aim 2). The results will
provide a comprehensive theoretical framework for identifying the mechanisms underlying prospective memory,
the source of age-related declines in prospective memory, and the efficacy of cognitive and strategy training as
a memory enhancement technique. The long-term goal of this research is to develop the capacity to identify who
will benefit most from strategy training interventions and which specific strategies should be targeted. Individually
tailored treatment options will result in increased ability to improve cognitive functioning for those experiencing
age-related memory decline. This work is innovative in its novel use of pupillometry to examine cognitive
processes not otherwise observable with standard behavioral measures and through the development of an
online training tool to improve everyday prospective memory. The findings will be significant for understanding
treatment options to improve prospective memory functioning in younger adults, older adults, and individuals
with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.

Grant Number: 3R16GM146705-03S1
NIH Institute/Center: NIH
Principal Investigator: Brett Ball