Elizabeth A. L. Stine-Morrow

The fantasy world of Harry Potter that millions have found so fascinating also turns out to be of interest to Beckman Institute researcher Liz Stine-Morrow. Not as a research topic, but as fertile ground for the perfect analogy.

To Stine-Morrow her research showing that our choices, both implicit and explicit, determine the fate of our cognitive functioning as we age is summed up rather nicely by Harry's headmaster, Dumbledore: "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."

Stine-Morrow is Professor of Educational Psychology at Illinois and a member of Beckman's Human Perception and Performance group who focuses on cognition and the capacity for learning throughout the lifespan. She is also a fan of author J.K. Rowling's wildly popular works of fiction, but her reason for submitting a paper titled "The Dumbledore Hypothesis of Cognitive Aging" to a psychology journal read by both psychologists and lay people is based on science.

When Stine-Morrow explains her research, her use of Dumbledore's admonition to Harry seems most appropriate. She poses the question of whether "individuals have some degree of control over developmental trajectories" of declining mental abilities that come with the aging process. Stine-Morrow's research says that they do, thanks to their choices, have some control over the cognitive aging process.

"When you're reading and learning you have a choice about how you allocate your effort," Stine-Morrow said. "The consequence is that you are creating mental representations and also building skills for another day.

"It's the same thing with the engagement work we're doing. You make a choice about how to allocate your time during the day: do you elect to engage in conversations in which you are likely to encounter novel ideas, take on the hard challenges, or do you shy away? Those too have implications. So it's really looking at how we self regulate our activity, how do we regulate our everyday experience so that we're knitting new neural networks. Some of (the choices) are implicit and some are explicit."

Stine-Morrow's current research has two main focal points, which she says are complementary. She has a reading project that studies what is called self-regulated learning (how people adapt reading strategies in later life to accomplish learning), and she has created a research project with a strong educational outreach aspect called Senior Odyssey.

Stine-Morrow, who heads the Adult Learning Lab at the Beckman Institute, is in the process of expanding the Senior Odyssey program to include a literacy component that would probe some of the same issues she has studied with self-regulated learning. Senior Odyssey started out with a pilot grant but gradually has turned into a full-fledged research project - an impressive achievement considering the program's modest beginnings.

Odyssey of the Mind is a well-known educational program that gives students the opportunity for creative problem-solving in friendly, team-style competitions. Stine-Morrow first got involved with the program a few years ago in New Hampshire when she served as a coach for her son's team. She discovered the students weren't the only ones enjoying the program's problem-solving challenges.

"What you found was the parents, who were the coaches, would sneak out after hours and have little Odyssey parties where they would do the spontaneous problems and play around with some of the long-term problems," Stine-Morrow said. "My son's team did the balsa wood problem both years he participated. This is still my favorite long-term problem. It's an engineering problem in which the team has to design and test a structure made out of a few ounces of balsa wood to hold as much weight as possible."

Stine-Morrow said there are different specifications for each year's problems.

"For example, one year it was a bridge that had to span x number of inches," she said. "Another year, certain geometric figures had to be built into the structure. It's a technical problem that can be solved by children, but can also be very challenging for adults. Some of these structures hold hundreds of pounds! Other long-term problems are more performance based, like re-imagining an historical event or creating a humorous character with certain features. When I got into it, I realized there is a lot of potential for adults."

In her research projects at the Cognitive Aging Lab at the University of New Hampshire, Stine-Morrow found that research participants were often enthusiastic about returning to the lab for another experiment because they thought the experience was fun, saying that they thought the activities gave them an opportunity to stay mentally sharp.

"The activities could be fun," Stine-Morrow said. "But at the same time, it struck me as odd that our laboratory would serve that function. Surely, there was a better way. The connection to Odyssey of the Mind was obvious."

After coming to Illinois, Stine-Morrow had an opportunity to develop the idea. The Senior Odyssey program was one of the pilot projects submitted as a part of the Center for Healthy Minds (with Denise Park and Art Kramer as principal investigators). Funding from the Center was used to develop a small program, which led to a small, two-year grant funded by the National Institute on Aging at $45,000 per year. Two cycles of the pilot program were conducted from Fall 2004 to Spring 2006.

The program consisted of teams of adults over the age of 60 who take part in creative problem-solving over a 20-week period. There was a tournament at the end of each season for the teams, who as a group come up with creative solutions to ill-defined problems. The research aspect looks at the potential cognitive benefits derived from the intellectual and social engagement the subjects experience during the program.

"We did it the right way," Stine-Morrow said of the program. "We randomly assigned participants to do Senior Odyssey or to be in a wait-list control group. We measured variety of cognitive abilities, and there was a lot of overlap with the constructs that were used in the ACTIVE trials. We took measurements before and after the program, and what we showed across the two years of the pilot was that people in the control group tended to show declines in cognitive abilities and that people in the experimental group tended to show an increase. It's a relatively small sample with a very narrow set of measures and not a very strong effect, but it has been promising enough to use as a justification for scaling this thing up."