developmental psychology in memory

• what is developmental psychology

  how and why people change over the course of their lives
• what is the main part of developmental psychology we look at

  Alzheimer's
• what is alzheimers


  a physical disease that affects the brain and leads to dementia
• how does alzheimers come about

  when some of the billions of nerve cells that are supposed to be connected to each other in the brain lose their connection with each other and so nerve cells and brain tissue dies
• what type of disease is alzheimers

  a progressive one
• what does a progressive disease mean

  it gradually gets worse - over time more parts of the brain become damaged
• what happens psychologically as alzheimers progresses, examples

  problems with memory occur - losing items, forgetting names, forgetting events, getting lost in familiar places
• what other things may develop as result of alzheimers

  speech issues, seeing things in different dimensions, struggles with concentration and orientation
• what do early symptoms of alzheimers involve relating to memory

  patients start to lose the ability to retain new information and memories but still can remember old memories
• what part of memory is mainly impacted in alzheimers

  working memory - central executive and visuospatial processing
• when are the memory types affected in alzheimers

  episodic affected first as hippocampus damaged earlier on in the disease, then semantic
• what did Baddeley et al find in their experiment

  when ppts were asked to identify a letter Z amongst other distractor letters, patients with alzheimers performed worse and when dual tasks were introduced they were even more impaired
• what other thing is involved in developmental psychology

  dyslexia
• how does dyslexia affect memory

  children with it tend to perform poorly on tests of memory span
• what part of memory do people with dyslexia typically struggle with

  working memory - particularly phonologically
• how does the struggle with working memory affect memory

  it impacts the ability for people to process and remember information which makes it harder to learn things and remember the things learnt which is why dyslexia makes it hard for people to read and spell