Memory slips with age, but getting a fair amount of sleep every night and having a cheerful mood each day may help you stay sharp even when you grow old, suggests new research.
Poor sleep quality and a depressed mood are linked to areduced likelihood of remembering a previously experienced event, said thestudy published in the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society.
The researchers found strong associations between workingmemory and three health-related factors such as sleep, age and depressed mood.
Working memory is the part of short-term memory thattemporarily stores and manages information required for cognitive tasks such aslearning, reasoning and comprehension.
Working memory is critically involved in many highercognitive functions, including intelligence, creative problem-solving, languageand action-planning. It plays a major role in how we process, use and rememberinformation.
The study found that age is negatively related to the”qualitative” aspect of working memory — that is, how strong or howaccurate the memory is.
“Other researchers have already linked each of thesefactors separately to overall working memory function, but our work looked athow these factors are associated with memory quality and quantity – the firsttime this has been done,” said Weiwei Zhang, Assistant Professor at theUniversity of California, Riverside in the US.
“All three factors are interrelated. For example,seniors are more likely to experience negative mood than younger adults. Poorsleep quality is also often associated with depressed mood”, Zhang added.
The researchers performed two studies. In the first study,they sampled 110 college students for self-reported measures of sleep qualityand depressed mood and their independent relationship to experimental measuresof working memory.
In the second study, the researchers sampled 31 members of acommunity ranging in age from 21 to 77 years. In this study, the researchersinvestigated age and its relationship to working memory.
The researchers are the first to statistically isolate theeffects of the three factors on working memory quantity and quality. Although all three factors contribute to acommon complaint about foggy memory, they seem to behave in different ways andmay result from potentially independent mechanisms in the brain. These findings could lead to futureinterventions and treatments to counteract the negative impacts of thesefactors on working memory.