Alan Castel
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Psychology
Memory changes are among the most common worries of older adults. Yet healthy older adults can often still remember what matters most to them.
- Fields
Psychology
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
memory and aging
older adults
cognitive aging
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Test whether older adults can learn, with practice, to selectively remember high-value information under stress or rushing, compared with younger adults, including when motivated by responsibility or fear of forgetting.
- Determine whether older adults can control selective forgetting and update information, using a directed forgetting task in which they remember items they are responsible for bringing on a trip.
- Examine whether older adults selectively remember changes in financial gains at the expense of losses, such as changes in stock prices or updates to a retirement plan.
- Develop a memory-testing training program that uses repeated testing to redirect attention toward warning signs of scams, such as advance-fee fraud, and test whether it transfers to other scams.
More about the research
This research asks how goals and motivation help older people focus memory on important information and let go of outdated details. It also asks how this selectivity can backfire, for example by making them more vulnerable to scams.
Why it matters
Financial fraud and scams are a serious threat to older adults. The project's memory-testing training program could help them recognize warning signs of deceptive offers instead of focusing only on promised rewards. More broadly, learning how older adults can remember what is important and forget outdated information could support their independence and quality of life.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Sara Festini
University of Tampa, FL·Psychology
Test whether words assigned high value after they were studied are recalled faster and more accurately from working memory than low- or negative-value words, using brief computer-based word memory tasks.
Christopher S Green
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Psychology
Test whether cognitive training benefits can be produced by placebo, using 'pure expectation' methods in which participants are told that an inactive training program will improve their thinking.
Beth Snitz
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Recruit 300 older adults and conduct yearly neuropsychological testing, neurological exams, and assessments of function, behavior and mood, to support studies of cognitive aging.
The school
University of California-Los Angeles: 84 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 803 research doctorates a year.
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