Individuals who have attained the age of 45 to 64 years are said to be in their midlife and this age marks a cognitive change and adjustments. Most specifically these individuals are likely to experience changes in information processing in the area of processing speed, attention, and memory. According to Guest, Howard, Brown, and Gleeson (2015), during midlife, the information processing speed slows down with some aspects related to memory tend to decline. This outcome is usually associated with diminishing and dying of neurons in the brain, which leads to the neural network breakdown. The brain compensates for the breakdown by forming synaptic connections but these new connections are not as efficient as the ones that are being replaced (Guest et al., 2015). As a result, individuals in their midlife may have challenges in processing several types of cognitive information.
Apart from slowed information processing older adults are more likely to lose more information as it is moving through their cognitive system when compared to younger adults. Most of the time, the entire cognitive system is forced to slow down so that it can inspect and interpret all the information that comes into it. For this reason, individuals in their midlife may have trouble when they try to multitask, switch attention, or engage in inhibition (Kuther, 2018). Moreover, individuals in their midlife may not be able to retain much information considering that there is a decline in the use of their memory strategies. In this case, this individual can only process store and retrieve a small bit of information at a time, which then slows down their cognitive abilities.
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Individuals in their midlife years are likely to have challenges when it comes to the attention, which is a major function of the cognitive process. In this regard, these individuals selective attention which is the ability to focus on specific stimuli while disregarding others is affected. More so, it is possible that the individuals will not be capable of switching their attention from one stimulus to the other with ease. Additionally, these individuals sustained attention may be affected in that they cannot concentrate on a specific task for an extended period (Kuther, 2018). Overall, these attention deficits tend to have significant impacts on the individual's ability to function independently and adequately in everyday life.
References
Guest, D., Howard, C. J., Brown, L. A., & Gleeson, H. (2015). Aging and the rate of visual information processing. Journal of Vision, 15 (14), 10-14.
Kuther, T. L. (2018 ). Lifespan Development in Context: A Topical Approach. New York: Sage Publications.
