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Tab Title: Speech and Language

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Speech and language processing are largely intact in older adults under normal conditions, although processing time may be somewhat slower than in young adults. There is evidence that conversation skills actually improve with age. Older people often tell well-structured elaborate narratives, usually have more extensive vocabularies, and although they exhibit the occasional word-finding difficulty, older adults are easily able to find other words. Deficits that occur under difficult processing conditions seem primarily attributable to sensory loss or working memory limitations, not necessarily to impairments in basic language capacities.

Tab Title: Decision Making

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Older adults, again possibly because of working memory limitations, tend to rely on expert opinion to a greater degree than young adults. Although this strategy may work reasonably well when the expert is well-qualified (e.g., a physician for medical decisions), it may leave older people susceptible to things such as investment scams. Poor decision-making may also be a result of episodic memory decline, particularly the loss of memory for details or source of information.

Tab Title: Executive Functions

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Executive functions serve a "command and control" function and can be viewed as the "conductor" of all cognitive skills. Executive control consists of a range of different cognitive processes that are involved in the planning, organization, coordination, implementation, and evaluation of many of our non-routine activities. For instance, executive control is what lets people organize trips, organize research projects, or organize and write a paper for school.

Problems with executive control may manifest as -

● difficulty planning a project,

● trouble estimating how long a project will take to complete,

● struggling to tell a story

● trouble communicating details in an organized, sequential manner,

● difficulty with retrieving information from memory,

● trouble initiating activities or tasks,

● difficulty retaining information while doing something with it, such as remembering a phone number while dialing