Answers aren’t always on `tip of tongue` for older adults

Washington -  “Tip-of-the-tongue” errors happen often to adults between the ages of 65-92, a new study has claimed.

In a study of 105 healthy, highly-educated older adults, 61 percent reported this memory mishap.

The study’s participants completed a checklist of the memory errors made in the last 24 hours, as well as several other tests.

About half of them reported making other errors that may be related to absent-mindedness, such as having to re-read a sentence because they forgot what it said, or forgetting where they placed an item.

The findings of the study from New University of Michigan may help brain-training programs target the memory problems people experience in daily life.

“Right now, many training programs focus on the age differences in memory and thinking that we see in laboratory studies,” Cindy Lustig, senior author of the study, said.

“However, those may not translate to the performance failures that are most common in everyday life,” Lustig said.

According to her, when people are tested in the lab and have nothing to rely on but their own memories, young adults typically do better than older adults.

However, when these studies are conducted in real-world settings, older adults sometimes outperform young adults at things like remembering appointments because the former are likely to use memory supports such as calendars, lists and alarms.

“When we looked at how people performed on standard laboratory tests, we found the usual age differences,” she said.

“People in their 80s and 90s performed worse than those in their 60s and early 70s,” Lustig said.

In contrast, no increase in daily memory errors was found based on age.

Lustig cautioned that an elderly person occasionally forgetting a name does not mean he’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias.

“Everybody forgets.

“However, our findings suggest that certain types of memory errors may be especially important to monitor for increases, which then should be discussed with a clinician,” she added.

The study has been published in the journal Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition.