Prof. Margie Lachman (PSYC), chair of the Psychology Department and director of the Lifespan Developmental Psychology Lab, was recently awarded a five-year, $1.45 million grant by the National Institute on Aging to continue her research on memory and aging.Lachman's research focuses on "memory changes in adulthood and looking for ways to optimize memory functioning throughout the adult years," she said.

Lachman identified stress and anxiety as major factors in memory, and this will be the focus of her future research under the new grant. "In the first grant we mainly asked people about their anxiety, but now we're actually going to be using physiological assessments," she said. These assessments include measuring cortisol, a hormone associated with stress, in saliva and measuring heart rate using an electrocardiogram.

In her 25 years conducting research in the field, Lachman found that memory loss is one of the chief concerns for adults of all ages, but that it is an expected outcome of aging. The problem is less important for younger adults, said Lachman, and they are more likely to attribute memory loss to being too busy.

Her goals are to chart memory across adulthood, seeing what forms of memory change over time, and then to look for factors that can either prevent or slow memory changes. The memory changes that Lachman is researching are distinct from extreme memory decline. "This is not dementia per se that we are studying, but the more normative, common problems that we have with memory as people get older," she said.

Lachman is studying individuals ranging from ages 20 to 85. She looks at young adults to find early signs and causes of memory loss that can be corrected as a means to prevent or slow memory loss later in life. "If we can identify risk factors in younger and middle-aged for later life problems, then we think that's a really important way to go," she said.

Lachman said that people show different patterns of memory change, not just decline. "There are some people that expect their memory's going to go downhill and they basically give up, . and there's other people who say, 'Well yeah, my memory's not as good as it used to be, but there are still things I can do,'" she said. People who feel in control are more likely to use strategies, including mnemonics, and have better memory performance.

Lachman found that a person's resilience to stress affects his ability to perform memory-related tasks.

"People who do really well [at memory tasks] are very resilient," she said. "Their stress level, although it does increase when we give them a difficult task, returns to their baseline level very quickly." She added that other peoples' stress levels stays elevated, and they don't perform as well.

She said that anxiety is especially harmful in that it has a greater negative effect on memory and makes people more forgetful.

Lachman's goal for her new research is to be able to intervene in the memory process, possibly using stress reduction techniques, in an effort to stave off memory loss as people age.

She is also investigating the role of exercise in memory and the fact that people who exercise have better memory, perhaps because exercise serves to reduce stress.

A final method of her research is using daily diaries, asking subjects to report any memory problems that they had during the day over an eight-day period. The subjects will also be given cortisol assessments to complete at home so Lachman can analyze memory and cortisol levels in relation to one another over this period.

She said she is conducting research at home in addition to measuring the subjects' performance in the lab in order to "see what's going on in [the subjects'] daily life and try to mix the two and get a comprehensive picture of memory.