The federal government’s Canada Research Chairs program invests up to $311 million per year to attract and retain some of the world’s most accomplished and promising minds. Chairholders are recognized to be national and international experts in the fields of engineering and the natural sciences, health sciences, humanities and social sciences. Brock University has 11 active Canada Research Chairs, with more to be announced. This monthly series profiles the work, and lives, of Brock’s Chairholders.

Growing up, Karen Campbell spent many hours in awe listening to memories shared by her beloved Polish grandmother.

Her grandmother didn’t shy away from difficult topics, including her imprisonment in Auschwitz during the Second World War, and detailed how she met and married Campbell’s grandfather in a recovery camp after the war.

“I loved dropping by my grandmother’s house and chatting with her about her life, all the struggles that she’d been through and what it was like coming to Canada,” says Campbell, now an Associate Professor of Psychology at Brock University. “I think those discussions really informed my wanting to focus on aging and memory.”

As Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Aging, Campbell explores the role attentional control plays in older adults’ memory recall.

Campbell’s bond with her grandmother inspired her to explore the psychology of older adults and the aging process as an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto. She became particularly interested in memory and cognition because of one of her courses.

“In my upper undergraduate years, whenever we were given free rein over what we would write about, I always choose the topic of aging and memory,” she says.

After taking a year off as an exchange student in the United Kingdom, Campbell returned to the University of Toronto as a graduate student, where her passion for the study of aging and memory deepened.

Two of her graduate school mentors — Professor Emerita Lynn Hasher and Professor of Geriatric Psychiatry Cheryl Grady, a former Canada Research Chair in Neurocognitive Aging — steered Campbell onto a unique research path that has shaped her career.

Campbell joined Brock as a Canada Research Chair in 2017 after serving as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. and Harvard University in the U.S.

Her work challenges the conventional view that memory loss is inevitable as people age, a phenomenon commonly attributed to age-related deterioration of memory centres in the brain.

Instead, “older adults are worse at focusing their attention, which gets in the way of what they want to remember,” says Campbell.

Several factors contribute to this reduction in attentional control. Older adults take in more information than young people, which gets in the way of trying to remember things.

Campbell and her Brock Neurocognitive Aging Lab took her mentors’ work a step further by showing older adults link many bits of information together, encoding greater amounts of distracting information into the brain’s memory centre.

These complex networks of links make it difficult for older people to focus on the task at hand as they sift through various facts, images, thoughts and other sources of stimulation.

“Trying to connect too many unrelated things can lead to memory errors,” Campbell says.

Older adults are also less able to make a clear distinction between one physical location or event and another that immediately follows when they recall information and events.

Campbell says “event boundaries” — transitions between locations or events — trigger mechanisms in the brain that shape how events are stored in long-term memory.

“We find that many older adults tend to blur events together in long-term memory, which affects their ability to recall what happened,” she says.

Now two years into her second term as a Canada Research Chair, Campbell and her team are developing interventions to support older adults’ memory recall and are also examining other contributors to memory decline, including excessive screen time.

Through her various outreach activities, she shares suggestions for older adults seeking to improve their memory recall, including taking on tasks at times when they are best able to focus, getting seven to nine hours of sleep at night, exercising regularly and having their hearing tested.