Taxas de esquecimento em idosos: um estudo através da memória háptica

Abstract

Memory is a multiple system made by codification subsystems, storage and recovery of information. The rating can be done through the type of stimulus processed - visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory or tactile. Inside the tactile memory is found the subcategory of haptic memory, responsible for the acquisition of information by the active manipulation of objects. The memory subsystems show significant drop with the healthy aging and with distinct effects in its components. It has been found few studies relating long term forgetting for the haptic memory in healthy old people. In this sense, this research had aimed to evaluate the forgetting rates of information processed by the haptic modality in different time spans for remember and recognition memories in a thirty six old people sample, both sex, no cognitive commitment and with reading and writing skills. For that purpose, it was used a specific wooden box for the presentation of the haptic stimuli. The procedure is made of two parts, one study phase (stimuli presentation) and the test phase (remember or recognition tasks), realized after intervals of one, ten or twenty minutes. The Kruskal-Wallis test for independent samples showed significant differences between the remember and recognition memory and the time spans analyzed (H = 23,17; gl = 1; p < 0,05). Is was used as post hoc the nonparametric Mann-Whitney test with Bonferroni correction, which presented significant differences between the ten minutes remember condition and ten minutes recognition condition (p < 0,083), although this differences weren't detected in the comparison of the remember and recognition tests for the interval of twenty minutes (p > 0,083). These data reveal that the type of test didn't influence in the recovery of the information after twenty minutes, indicating that the loss of the processed information by the haptic modality in old people starts to stabilize beyond this interval, independently from the evocation test. In general, results show few loss of information when it's processed haptically, suggesting that the evocation for longer time spans in this modality cannot be affected by aging.