Memory and Multitasking: A study on the role of age

Advancements in the medical filed have significantly increased people’s life expectancy all over the world, leading to a heightened interest in age-related disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Dementia. Furthermore, scholars also started to research on healthy individuals, with the purpose to have a better understanding of the aging process during the entirety of a person’s life span. The objective behind this research was to observe the effect that age has on mnemonic abilities, tested with the use of multitasking testes. There were two hypotheses postulated before the data collection, the first one was an expectation of a stable decline on cognitive functions modulated by dual task tests with advancing age. The second hypothesis was based on the cognitive reserve paradigm, and we were interested in observing on our sample the effect that educational attainment has on it, with always age as a factor. The sample was composed by 637 healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 89, which were tested on a self-guided online protocol. The test is composed of three experimental tasks and a cognitive screening. The results yielded conformed to the findings found in literature, with age as the main factor in the decrease of speed in response time across all tasks, and with education as a signific factor for the cognitive reserved score, acting as a protective factors for those individuals with an increasing age but also a high educational attainment. The thesis is arranged into three main chapters, chapter one focuses on some of the main theories behind the study of the aging mind among the field of psychology with a section dedicated to the cognitive reserve and another on the use of multitasking tools to detect a variety of stages of memory impairments. The second chapter centers on the description of the experiment and the data analysis. The last chapter is composed by the discussion of the results and the conclusion.