A team of researchers from Beckman Institute have been studying how reading for pleasure affects memory, and have found that it can help preserve memory skills as people get older.
They studied both episodic and working memory. In the context of reading, episodic memory allows us to recall something that already happened in a story. Working memory is our ability to recall what we’ve just read while continuing to read and understand.
The team, led by Educational Psychology faculty member Liz Stine-Morrow, collaborated with librarians from Adult Literacy Services at the Champaign Public Library to select engaging books to use for the study. Then older adult participants read these books on iPads for 90 minutes a day, five days a week, for eight weeks, while a control group completed word puzzles on iPads. At the beginning and end of the eight weeks, both groups completed cognitive tests at Beckman’s Adult Learning Lab.
The results? “The study demonstrated that regular, engaged reading strengthened older adults’ memory skills.”
The Beckman team published their findings in Frontiers of Psychology, and hope that this sort of knowledge can be applied to treatment plans for Alzheimer’s.
You can read more about the study at the Beckman Institute website.
Top photo of the research team from the Beckman Institue website (l-r): Shuk Han Ng, visiting research data manager; Giavanna McCall, graduate student in educational psychology; Ilber Manavbasi, research staff member; and Liz Stine-Morrow, a Professor Emerita in educational psychology.
