Loved ones prompt memories

Through sickness and in health, for better or worse; your other half is often there to encourage and support you. But when it comes to memory, is your partner making you more forgetful?

Researchers at Iowa State University claim to be among the first to report that social partners can assist in extending memory, but found this may not be the case for couples older than 70 years of age.

Jennifer Margrett, lead author and assistant professor in human development and family studies at the university, said the findings revealed spouses rely on each other as “external memory aids”.

However, the effectiveness of memory depended on how reliable the partner’s memory was.

“Overall, in my lab we found collaboration is usually very helpful on a variety of cognitive tasks, but it’s sort of a mixed bag in this recent study, which focuses on memory tasks,” Professor Margrett said.

“When you think about memory, if I ask you to remember something, you’ll be on a roll, think of one thing, and then another thing should come. But having a partner who interrupts you, interjects and, perhaps leads you down a ‘garden path’, can definitely interfere in memory. So you may have done better on the memory path working alone than you did with a partner,” she explained.

The study, published in the online journal Psychology, also found middle-aged couples filled in the “memory gaps” more effectively than older couples.

The research was conducted on 14 married couples – three being younger with the average age of 35 years, five were middle-aged (average age of 52 years) and the other six were older couples with an average age of 73 years.

Participants were asked to perform 10 different prospective memory tasks, some which included; four tasks that regularly occur (ie taking medication with breakfast), four tasks that were different each day (ie purchasing gasoline for the car), and two being time-restricted tasks such as checking lung capacity at two specified times.

To determine whether partners tried to assist each other in completing the tasks, the participants were video-recorded, which did in fact show partners had attempted to collaborate with each other on various memory tasks.

Professor Margrett said although the study specifically looked at couples, results may also be similar in caregivers of people with dementia, co-workers and adult children.

“But the main finding was – two heads weren’t necessarily better than one among the older couples,” she added.