Upcoming meeting
Workshop on Cognitive Aging
Dolce Palisades
Palisades, NY
October 23-25, 2013
Précis | Agenda | Registration Form | Participant List | Travel Arrangements | Reimbursement
Précis
A range of studies have established that memory performance declines with advancing age. Nevertheless, the following are some of the general questions that have remained unanswered:
- How does memory decline characterized in a laboratory setting affect the day-to-day lives of older individuals who would like to stay engaged in a cognitively complex world?
- Is memory decline mediated by external factors, or is there an ‘internal clock’ whereby select neurons are vulnerable to the wear-and-tear of the aging process?
- Does the increased variability in memory scores, which typically accompanies memory decline, reflect ‘parametric noise’ or does it contain information about why individuals vary in their resistance to the aging process?
The workshop is organized so that investigators with diverse backgrounds can deliberate over these questions in a round table format. Instead of covering all aspects of cognitive aging, these broad questions are best answered by focusing on one component of memory. We have chosen to focus on age related decline in pattern separation, which as an established phenotype of cognitive aging is characterized at the psychological, computational, anatomical, and cellular levels.
The goal is not necessarily to provide specific answers, but to lay down a framework for how the questions can be addressed. The overarching aim is to translate theory into practice and to improve our ability to investigate age-related memory decline, which--with our increasing longevity-- has emerged as a cognitive epidemic.