Ageing brains make good use of ‘useless’ bits of information

TORONTO - Old people have the unique ability to tie useless bits of information to other data appearing at the same time, research says.

This may actually give their ageing brains a memory advantage over their younger counterparts, a new study shows.

Scientists at Rotman Research Institute have shown when older adults “hyper-encode” these bits of useless information, without even knowing they’re doing it, they have the unique ability to tie it to other information appearing at the same time.

The study was led by Karen Campbell, doctoral student in psychology at the University of Toronto, supervised by Rotman scientist Lynn Hasher.

“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,” said Campbell.

In the study, 24 younger adults (17 to 29 years) and 24 older adults (60 to 73 years) participated in two computer-based memory tasks that were separated by a 10-minute break.

The older adults showed a 30 percent advantage over younger adults in their memory for the preserved pairs (the irrelevant words that went with the pictures in the first task) relative to the new pairs, says a Rotman release.

“This could be a silver lining to ageing and distraction,” said Hasher. “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.”

The findings appear online in Psychological Science.