Elizabeth Stine-Morrow - Beckman Institute Human Perception and Performance Group

The cognitive benefits older adults can gain by adopting even a modest exercise program have been demonstrated in studies, but there are other interventions that could also prove helpful in preventing or even mediating cognitive decline.

Elizabeth Stine-Morrow, a Professor of Educational Psychology whose research at the Beckman Institute focuses on cognition and the capacity for learning throughout the life span, has devised a unique program for exploring the potential benefits older adults can get from engagement with others through a problem-solving team competition. After getting involved in Odyssey of the Mind through her own children, Stine-Morrow decided to apply the team problem-solving template in that educational program to her own research. For the past five years Stine-Morrow has been developing Senior Odyssey, a program that works as both a research tool and intervention project for older adults.

Starting with a small grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIA) in 2004, Stine-Morrow has expanded Senior Odyssey into a $1.9M, five-year, multi-level research project and community-based cognitive intervention program for older adults. In the Senior Odyssey program, teams of adults age 60 and over participate in long-term problem solving over a 16-week session and compete in a tournament at the end of the session that is judged by the same criteria as that used in the international Odyssey of the Mind competition.

In this video interview, Stine-Morrow talks about the theory behind the Senior Odyssey program and what she has learned so far about its effect on cognition.

©2008 Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Science & Technology

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• Beckman
• Illinois
• Research
• Aging