Dr. Tiffany Chow

Date: March 9^th

Time:7:00pm

Location: Royal Bank Theatre, Halifax Infirmary, 1796 Summer St.

Presenter:Tiffany Chow, MD
Clinician Scientist, Rotman Research Institute & Ross Memory Clinic,
Assistant Professor, Depts. of Medicine (Neurology Division) and Psychiatry (Geriatric Psychiatry Division), University of Toronto
Fellow, American Neuropsychiatric Association

This lecture is sponsored by the Canadian Dementia Knowledge Translation Network.

Karen Campbell, a PhD student in psychology at the University of Toronto, working with the Rotman Institute, says “We found that older brains are not only less likely to suppress irrelevant information than younger brains, but they can link the relevant and irrelevant pieces of information together and implicitly transfer this knowledge to subsequent memory tasks.

Dr. Lynn Hasher, whose work at the Rotman Institute focuses on inhibitory control over the contents of working memory, explains the advantage of this process: 

“This could be a silver lining to aging and distraction. Older adults with reduced attentional regulation seem to display greater knowledge of seemingly extraneous co-occurrences in the environment than younger adults. As this type of knowledge is thought to play a critical role in real world decision- making, older adults may be the wiser decision-makers compared to younger adults because they have picked up so much more information.”

Read the full article here.