STINE-MORROW: I'm Liz Stine-Morrow and I'm the principal investigator in the Adult Learning Lab.
All the research in my lab is, one way or another, related to healthy minds.
Whether we are studying the effects of educational programs
or whether we're talking about how to change our reading strategies as we get older,
all of this is about keeping a healthy mind throughout the lifespan.
SHAKE: One of the long-standing interests in our laboratory is age differences in
how people allocate effort to language processes; particularly reading.
And so we have a variety of methods with which we examine that.
One of the easiest methods is just use a computer and have people read sentences
on the screen and have them press a button when they are finished reading the sentence.
But you can only get so fine-tuned on that type of analysis
because you can't tell at any given time what words they are looking at...
what words, for example, may cause an older adult to pause longer
or maybe go back to re-read another part of the text.
So a better way to get at those types of questions is an eye-tracker, like this device here...
where we can get moment-to-moment samples of where exactly their gaze
position is on screen.
STINE-MORROW: Where the eyes are looking is a very sensitive indicator
of what the mind is doing.
And by measuring where younger and older readers are looking,
we can get a sense of the kinds of cognitive processes that are going on when they read.
SHAKE: About 250 to 500 times every second,
it's getting a reading of where the eyes are fixated on the screen.
And so you get some kind of output similar to this,
where each of the circles represents a fixation and the yellow squares represent words.
The larger the circle, the longer the fixation. So we can look at how many fixations were,
for example, at parts of the sentence that were near clause-boundaries
or near punctuation.
We can look at which words tend to be associated with regressions.
For example, it's very common that words that are very unusual,
or have a low-frequency, people often go back and re-read
or spend longer looking at words that are unusual.
So then we can identify which parts of sentences older-adults
tend to spend more time reading, and what parts of sentences they tend to re-read.
And that way we can better identify older-adults' language processes.
STINE-MORROW: What we're finding is that older readers tend to chunk things in smaller segments
in order to maintain good levels of comprehension.
So it's a shift in strategy that enables us to
maintain our ability to read very, very well...
even though there may be some declines in working memory capacity or speed of processing.
SHAKE: Because older adults have smaller working memory,
they can hold less information in there in their working memory in the given time.
So they often have to pause and "wrap-up" more often...
or regress more often to earlier parts of the text.
STINE-MORROW: We read in order to connect ideas together that we
haven't had before connected in our minds.
And, when you're young, and you have a large working memory capacity,
you can put together a lot of ideas at once.
As you get older, and your working memory capacity decreased a little bit,
you have to put together fewer ideas at one time.
The message still gets put together. You still are able to understand the whole thing.
You just do it differently.
SHAKE: So, if older adults take longer to process text,
that's important to know for a variety of reasons.
STINE-MORROW: So there are not only implications of this research for giving direction about strategy,
but also about how to engineer text so that it can be more elder-friendly.
SHAKE: You might want to be very careful in how you arrange the text...
not to include too much information within one sentence...
or go on too long without some kind of natural pause...
including periods and commas and those types of things.
STINE-MORROW: For example, sentences with complicated syntactic structure, or a lot of information,
are probably not so good if you want to be understood by an older audience.
SHAKE: The hope of anyone who studies aging, any kind of aging process,
is that the stuff will eventually be used to improve older-adults lives in some way;
whether it's just older-adults' knowledge about their own learning and memory processes,
or whether it's something that can really help them get by in daily life.
So, I hope it will be useful to not just me, but to everyone.
STINE-MORROW: I have talked to a number of our older
participants who talk about giving up reading novels and things they used to enjoy
because they can't keep track of things.
And if we could give explicit direction
about how to think about what you're reading a little bit differently,
so that you can maintain that participation in the discourse world,
it would not only help us to maintain an activity that we enjoy as we get older,
but, given that reading itself is an activity that's known to keep us cognitively alert,
it is a way to help us keep a healthy mind.