Salthouse launches aging initiative

Timothy A. Salthouse, a scholar who is internationally recognized for his research on cognitive aging, joined the College this past fall as the Brown Forman Professor of Psychology.

Salthouse will jump-start the Virginia Aging Initiative, a newly funded project that will bring together U.Va. researchers from several areas of psychology to explore topics related to aging. Through the initiative, he will guide the formation and direction of research, and coordinate a large-scale study pulling together faculty, graduate students and undergrads to investigate aging and cognition. Over the course of two years, the study will collect data from approximately 250 people, ranging in age from 18 to 80.

Although it is widely known that older people perform less well than younger people on tests assessing memory, reasoning and spatial abilities, researchers do not know what factors contribute to age-related weakening in performance. According to Salthouse’s research, such declines appear to be associated with working memory and information processing speed.

In recent studies, he has tried to determine if people’s knowledge or experience reduces the consequences of these declines. He researched how architects, musicians, engineers and people who regularly complete crossword puzzles perform on memory tasks. A study with musicians, for example, showed that those with higher levels of experience performed better on music-related memory tasks than those with lower levels of experience. However, age-related declines were of the same magnitude among all experience levels. “It’s very discouraging,” Salthouse said. “I have not yet been able to find evidence that ‘using it’ prevents people from ‘losing it.’”