The plate's the thing:

Memory performance
subject of professor's research

by Mary Lisa Russell

You avoid fatty foods, caffeine, sodas, and cigarettes, and you get plenty of exercise to keep your body looking young. But what can you do for your mind? It's the nation's latest health obsession - fighting forgetfulness - keeping your memory on track.

Physicians prescribe drugs, health food stores recommend herbs, and Dr. Matthew Sharps (Psychology) uses ugly plates - at least he uses them in his research to help improve memory performance for the normal aging adult.

"I have used common, ordinary dinner plates that are relatively 'ugly' so they are visually distinctive," said Sharps. "Specific methods of using these plates can help older adults improve their memory for everyday obligations. The method has proven to be affordable, simple and very effective."

Sharps explains that data from his studies reflect as much as a 65 percent increase in memory performance for older adults at an average cost of only 60 cents per person.

And that, according to Sharps, is a special bargain when you consider how much money is being spent on improving the average American's mental vigor.

The choice of an "ugly" plate for his research subjects is very deliberate. He wants the plate to "stick out" in their home environments. Sharps tells the subjects to leave the plate in an area they frequent the most - such as on the kitchen table.

Next older adults are instructed to leave items on the plate that they might normally forget, such as keys, medicine bottles, or glasses. If they need a reminder for something like a doctor's appointment, then Sharps suggests Post-It Notes stuck to the plate at odd angles. The odd angles of the notes strengthen the distinctiveness of the message and its repre-sentation in memory, helping the participant to keep on task.

Through this simple plate-and-note method, the participant now has an aid to enhance memory performance by around 65 percent - perhaps the most effective memory aid ever developed.

"This is just a very small part of what my students and I have been working on over the last few years," said Sharps. "Our experiments have ranged from highly technical methods to the simplistic plate-and-note method."

Finishing his fourth year of a $467,000 research grant awarded by the National Institute on Aging to study aging and memory for relational and imageric information, Sharps has racked up an impressive number of journal articles and conference presentations on the subject.

On a larger scale, Sharps has spent 14 years researching cognitive aging. Dur-ing the last four years, while conducting research through the grant, Sharps has conducted 10 experiments with more than 1,950 young and old adult participants.

The result of this work has been a new and integrated theory of visual memory and aging.

Sharps has found that the memory deficits most people expect in older adults are actually much less global and more confined to specific circumstances than is usually thought.

"This fact, that normal older people's memory is better than we thought it was, has enabled us to understand and use factors that can improve memory in those areas where enhancement is needed," said Sharps.

A visually distinctive focal point - such as the plate - is used as a core to build better memory, both for items and upcoming events through a simple reminder system.

"It is incredibly easy to use and it accomplishes our goal of improving memory performance," Sharps said.

Sharps explained that when adults get older, they have cognitive slowing caused by random breakage of connections. In simple terms, his work suggests that all the impulse signals don't hit their destinations in the brain at the same time, so the person might not even remember the first part of a message by the time the other parts are received.

"We can compensate for this problem by using visually distinctive stimuli, like the plates, which appear to shore up the memory traces and may compensate for the random breakage," explained Sharps.

"Great numbers of older adults in today's society have low or fixed incomes," said Sharps. "Our idea is not to find expensive, high-tech solutions to memory problems, but simple, cheap methods that can be used by anyone with proper guidance and training."

Sharps feels the future for this type of research is practically unlimited. He hopes that as researchers learn more about memory, they will find a variety of ways to help older adults learn and remember more effectively.

"The key to the whole enterprise is to recognize that older people actually have far better mental capabilities than has often been believed," said Sharps. "Most of the abilities are still there; they just need to be accessed effectively."