bjbj Elizabeth Stine-Morrow - Beckman Institute Human Perception and Performance Group HYPERLINK
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIRIjuryt7Y" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIRIjuryt7Y
Senior Odyssey The Senior Odyssey is first and foremost is a research project that s
geared towards understanding whether an engaged lifestyle actually melabilities as we get
older. So we recruit people from the community who are not terribly engaged, who have activities
in less than 15 hours of scheduled hours a week; we try to get the couch potatoes into
the lab and then we randomly assign them to the senior odyssey program to our waitlist
control and we measure their cognitive abilities in a number of ways; we measure speed of processing,
working memory capacity, inductive reasoning, and we measure that at the beginning of the
program and then they go through the program- it takes about 5 or 6 months-and then we measure
these things afterward. And we find out if there is differential change in the control
group and the senior odyssey group. So right now we have two different versions of the
odyssey; we have the Troy program that is built on an existing program called Odyssey
of the Mind, it s been around for about 25 years for kids and younger adults, and this
was originally developed by an engineering professor in New Jersey who was trying to
develop a program to give his students practice using what they used in the classroom outside
of the classroom, so applying what they learned in real-life problem situations. So there
s basically two aspects of the program; one, you practice working as a team to develop
a solution to a problem that s very challenging, so it requires thinking through a solution,
testing your solution, and then revising it based on what you find. The other aspect is
thinking quickly on your feet. So that s the Troy program that we ve adopted for the Senior
Odyssey program. And then the spontaneous problems are presented to the teams in groups
every week and we have these all on PowerPoint slides and the teams have to work quickly
to do that. So far we ve had three Senior Odyssey tournaments in the community; the
first one was a community center, the second one was at an elementary school, and last
year it was Carle Foundation on a big stage and it was really quite an event. We have
grandchildren coming to watch their grandparents solve these problems and perform. The Odyssey
participants work on the problem itself and the also present this with style. So they
make costumes, they create sets, and they create a humorous performance and they perform.
In 8 minutes, they are presenting these solutions and along the way, along the way to developing
these solutions, they re exercising a variety of cognitive abilities. They re exercising
spatial ability in trying to figure out how to sew up costumes or create sets; they re
exercising different aspects of memory in writing and memorizing a script. They re having
to exercising speed of processing because there is a lot of give and take in these spontaneous
problems. Their actually exercising all of these abilities over the long term and the
tournament is really the motivator for this because you know you re going to have to present
publically what you ve worked on. It s really an event; it s a celebration. The teams are
formed in the fall based on their preference for the particular type of long-term problem.
And they work all year as a team to develop these solutions to the long-term problem and
to practice working as a team for problems they ve never encountered before and then
they participate in this tournament that s a public event, it s a party, it s a celebration.
And they get prizes, so we have trophies and it s a great day. Social Engagement and Cognition
This is a lot of fun but there is also some science behind it. There s a lot of literature
on cognitive training that seems to show that there s a lot of plasticity in cognitive building
that is we have the capacity for change but it s very specific to the experience. So if
you re trained in speed of processing, you get faster but it doesn t necessarily mean
that it improves memory or if you re trained in memory strategies, it doesn t mean you
get better at spacial abilities. So it seems that the cognitive system is built to respond
very specifically to experience, but if you look at the correlational literature, where
we just look at about how people live their lives and their relationship to cognition.
It seems that the more engaged people, people that are more active- people that go to museums,
people that read a lot, people that take courses at local universities- those people tend to
do better in a variety of cognitive tasks. So the question is why is it that these people
are.. that there s this kind of broad-based vitality that seems to bleed through all of
life. So we re interested in how can we be those people who are good at everything, who
seem to be just more mentally volatile in a variety of different ways. So what are the
principles that lead one to do that? How do we go from a system that seems to be built
to respond to experience very narrowly to someone who can function well in a variety
of domains in life? So one idea is that an engaged person could be someone who just creates
a lifestyle where he or she is practicing different sorts of activities all the time,
different sorts of skills. Another possibility is that an engaged lifestyle requires a lot
of executive control because in managing all of these things, you ve got to be plan-ful,
you ve got to be mindful about managing time and making choices and so forth. Given that
the literature on engagement is very correlational -so, we not know what is the causing what-
we just know that these people that are more active, score better on cognitive tests. It
could be just that people that are more cognitively volatile select out that kind of a lifestyle.
So we re going to do an experiment to see if engagement really does affect cognition.
We re trying to do the experiment to assess the causality. So we won t really know if
it s the exercise of particular abilities because we re trying to make sure that they
get exercise in a lot of different facets or if it s the executive control; but participants
are keeping diaries and so forth and so we ll have some idea first of all, if there is
a causal relationship and then from the diaries, some ideas about what kinds of things people
do when they re the ones that are showing better change, more positive change over the
long haul. Potential Benefits of Senior Odyssey We have conducted a two year pilot that we
ve finished, and the results from this are going to be published next month. I have to
say, first off, that the effects are very, very small but relative to a control group
that this weighted to participate the next year, the Odyssey participants showed improvement
in speed of processing, inductive reasoning, and divergent thinking, and overall in a measure
of fluid ability relative to the control participants. Future Possibilities of Senior Odyssey Another
part of the rationale behind this program is that sociologists have argued for a long
time that we ve created age-segregated society, where the roles that we re allowed to have
are very tightly tied to our age. So when we re young, we re expected to be involved
in education, and when we re older, we re expected to be involved in work, and when
we re a little bit older than that, there s not much of a role tied to retirement; Sociologists
say that s a status without a role and that s changing as we have more older people in
the world, as the shift in the demographics go more towards the older people. But, it
s not really done, we re not very age-integrated yet and so part of the rational of the way
of constructing Odyssey, building it on an existing program that s widely available is
that, if this works, we re going to have turn-key science. We re going to have something that
you can just take off the shelf and use. We ve got older adults who can just pay, there
can be groups of older adults who are- -community organizations that pay the 130 dollar a year
fee and register a whole group of older adults to participate in this. So it s a readily
available program that anybody can use and so even though it s a little messy in terms
of science, it s not neat as some of the training work, is if it has benefits, it ll be widely
available and it ll help us move toward a more age- integrated social structure. yj[L
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