Senior Odyssey also became a success with the participants. After having tournaments in 2005 and 2006, Stine-Morrow took a break this year, but one of the teams decided to enter the Odyssey of the Mind competition in Illinois as a senior group. To creatively solve their problem, they wrote a script for a three-act play and earned a high score from the judges. With a team name of "The Aged Hams of Savoy," characters such as "Sara Bellum" and a "Senility Prayer" as part of their tournament effort, it was obvious the Senior Odyssey participants were having fun.

Stine-Morrow said the fact the participants were motivated enough to compete on their own says a lot about the translational aspect of the program in terms of a potential intervention for mitigating cognitive decline.

"If this works as a cognitive intervention, Odyssey of the Mind provides a social structure that could sustain it as a community program," she said. "It's a turnkey intervention. You can take the research off the shelf and use it."

Stine-Morrow may have created a monster with Senior Odyssey. The popularity of the program is growing, the local team was invited to the world tournament in Michigan, and senior teams are now allowed to take part in Odyssey of the Mind tournaments.

For her efforts, Stine-Morrow was given the 2007 Joanne Rompel Living the Creative Life Award at this year's Illinois Odyssey of the Minds tournament. She says her efforts with the program are part of a change in thinking about cognitive vitality in later life.

"Part of the argument is that we actually structure our society so that we don't make roles involving intellectual challenge very available for seniors," Stine-Morrow said. "We assume you're supposed to be educated when you're young. So we frontload education to the early part of the life span and it is supposed to help us develop capacities that are somehow retained through adulthood, in part, so that we can develop occupations, and then we retire. It's just a bizarre idea. For one thing, we are living so long now and you can't educate somebody for a job 50 years in the future. To some extent, we recognize this and provide training to develop or update particular skills in the context of work. But there just aren't a lot of models for true life span education in the broadest sense of the word. Odyssey is one answer to that."

As part of her reading project investigation into self-regulated learning, Stine-Morrow looks at topics such as attentional allocation during reading and memory monitoring. That research led to a 2006 paper in Psychology and Aging, where Stine-Morrow and her collaborators reported on the impact age-related declines in abilities like working memory can have on reading. An important theme in the paper, Adult Age Differences in the Effects of Goals on Self-Regulated Sentence Processing, is how resource allocation is used by younger and older adults to accomplish learning while reading.

"This paper basically shows that when you increase a goal for information acquisition - I want you to remember this to a high-level of accuracy - that actually improves younger adults performance more than older adults performance," Stine-Morrow said. "In part that's because young adults spent more time as the goal for accuracy was made more stringent. Older adults, on the other hand, were a little bit slower overall, but they didn't show the same increase the younger adults did in response to the increased performance demands. We know that speed of processing decreases with age, so if anything, older adults should have slowed down even more than the young as demands increased.

"So the question is why didn't they allocate the effort to try to meet the performance goal? Part of the reason was working memory capacity - how much information can you hold and manipulate at the same time. Participants who scored better on an independent measure of working memory were more likely to rise to the challenge. But also, controlling for working memory, participants who had stronger memory self-efficacy - a belief that their effort would pay off in good memory performance - were also more responsive to the task demands in allocating effort. Another piece of this is that we were presenting participants with purely cognitive goals; that may have not been highly motivating for elders."

Stine-Morrow said a theory of social and emotional selectivity developed by Laura Carstensen states that cognitive information acquisition goals are more important when people are young because it's a survival skill.

"As you get older pure information acquisition without more social and emotional context is not as relevant," Stine-Morrow said. "So what's more important are social goals, emotional goals, and social regulation. We're applying this to reading in an ongoing study in which we have a social and emotional reason to learn some new information. Will that help older adults? That kind of gets back to Odyssey because you're putting learning in a social context."

So both Senior Odyssey and the reading project work as research platforms and have translational aspects.

"I really see close linkages between what we are doing with the reading project and Senior Odyssey," Stine-Morrow said. "I think it has to do with how well you regulate your environment and activities and how you engage experience. What's gratifying to me about all this is the ability to consider the idea that engaging experience is important for long-term cognitive vitality and then testing it in a way that's meaningful for seniors."