Academic Overview
In order to attain academic success, it is important to understand how the human brain processes and stores information. In addition, it is important to determine whether the old and young people process information in the same way. In this regard, it is hypothesized that young people and the old ones process information differently. This paper will compare the differences in processing of information between the young and elderly people.
Differences in Processing Information
In a human brain, information is only processed after storage (Izquierdo, 1998). The information is stored in two main memories which include long-term and short-term memories. Short-term memory stores information for a short period implying that a person can lose that information easily. On the other hand, long-term memory stores information for a considerably long time. Information is maintained in the long-term memory by the structure of some unique proteins which become depleted as age advances (Izquierdo, 1998).
This implies that a young person’s brain has a lot of proteins which store information in the long-term memory. On the contrary, old people have fewer proteins than the young ones. As a result, a young person has a higher capacity to store information in the long-term memory than an old individual. This implies that an old person stores much information in the short-term memory while little information is stored in the long-term memory.
As a result, the elderly person retains very little information in the long-term memory. This accounts for the memory lapses that occur in the mind of old people while the young ones experience few cases of memory lapses. Therefore, it is evident that young students are better learners than old student. In fact, it is hypothesized that people attending school when they are your excel academically. On the other hand, the ones attending school during their old age experience a lot of academic difficulties.
Statement Evaluation and Inhibition
In regard to the statement, it focuses on the changes that occur in the brain. It means that the brain reduces its effectiveness as time progresses due to biological depletion of brain cells. The reduction in effectiveness of the brain could be portrayed by evaluating inhibition. Inhibition is the capability of the brain to ignore stimuli which are irrelevant to the task. For example, a hornbill’s noise is irrelevant to solving a sum in class.
Inhibition enables the brain to memorize important information (Mangun, 2013). When a person stores unrelated information in the memory, it causes confusion in the brain owing to storage of incompatible codes. This confusion causes difficulties when a person is processing information (Mangun, 2013).
In this regard, inhibition helps the person to ignore irrelevant stimuli in order to store and process important information only. As a result, the person retains a lot of information in the brain leading to better memory (Mangun, 2013). The level of inhibition in young people is higher than the old ones (Mangun, 2013).
Face Recognition
Obermeyer et al. (2012) conducted a research regarding the relationship between face recognition and age. He conducted the research to investigate whether the ability to recognize faces is affected by age.
In this light, he realized that old people’s ability to recognize the face of a person is not affected by vertical and horizontal orientations (Obermeyer et al., 2012). On the other hand, the author contended that young people recognize faces that are oriented horizontally in a better manner than the ones which are oriented vertically (Obermeyer et al., 2012).
References
Izquierdo, I. (1998). Short- And Long-Term Memory. Behavioral pharmacology, 9(5), 46.
Mangun, G. (2013). Cognitive Electrophysiology of Attention Signals of the Mind. Burlington: Elsevier Science.
Obermeyer, S., Kolling, T., Schaich, A., & Knopf, M. (2012). Differences between old and young adults’ ability to recognize human faces underlie processing of horizontal information. Front Aging Neurosci, 4(3). Web.