Psychology and Aging最新文献

Despite the increasing importance of digital skills in modern society, the development of information and communication technology (ICT) literacy in adulthood has received limited attention, particularly regarding gender differences over the course of life. Therefore, this study investigated between-person differences and within-person changes in ICT literacy over approximately 9 years in a sample of N = 2,266 adults from Germany. The result showed that younger adults exhibited higher ICT literacy than older adults, but within-person changes did not differ by age. On average, ICT literacy declined over time (Cohen's d = -0.30). Men consistently demonstrated higher ICT literacy than women (Cohen's d = 0.39), though gender did not influence changes in ICT literacy. Socioeconomic status did not robustly moderate these effects. These findings suggest that ICT literacy tends to decline across adulthood, while preexisting gender differences, likely rooted in earlier socialization processes, persist without substantial change. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Gross-motor sequence learning is fundamental for performing daily activities and maintaining independence across the lifespan. This study investigated how age and age simulation affect gross-motor sequence learning, focusing on acquisition, execution performance, explicit recall, and retention performance. We tested 74 participants belonging to five groups: young adults aged 18-27 years without (n = 14) or with (n = 15) an age simulation suit, middle-aged adults aged 30-59 years without (n = 15) or with (n = 15) the suit, and older adults aged 60-86 years without the suit (n = 15). Participants in the suit condition wore the GERonTologic Simulator age suit (Moll, 2021), which simulates age-related physical impairments by reducing sensory perception, flexibility, and strength. Participants performed a fixed 10-element gross-motor sequence task requiring full-body movements over 28 practice trials. Explicit sequence recall was assessed after acquisition, and a retention test was conducted on the following day. All groups demonstrated implicit sequence learning and maintained their performance levels from the end of acquisition to the retention test. However, young adults without the suit exhibited the fastest execution times and highest explicit recall scores. Notably, the suit significantly impaired execution performance and explicit recall in both younger and middle-aged adults, indicating that peripheral impairments can hinder explicit memory formation even when implicit learning remains intact. These findings highlight the significant impact of peripheral sensorimotor declines on gross-motor sequence learning and memory formation across the adult lifespan. The results underscore the importance of considering both cognitive and sensorimotor factors in motor learning research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Humans instinctively adapt their speech dynamics based on their communication partner. Despite the significant developmental differences between infants and older adults, research on vocal communication directed toward older adults has primarily documented broad adjustments that enhance comprehension, often interpreted as mirroring baby talk. This study examined spoken, sung, and whispered vocalizations produced by young native English-speaking female adults directed at infants, older adults, and young adults. Three separate groups of speakers produced either spoken (19 speakers), sung (21 speakers), or whispered (19 speakers) vocalizations. Results showed distinct acoustic patterns in vocalizations directed toward older adults across all three vocal modes. Then, three separate groups of young native English-speaking listeners evaluated either the spoken (185 listeners), sung (194 listeners), or whispered (171 listeners) vocalizations and accurately identified the intended audience. These findings challenged the assumption of uniform communication strategies for infants and older adults. Furthermore, older adult-directed vocalizations were associated more with infants than with young adults. We propose that an assessment of the cognitive, hearing, emotional, and attentional needs and abilities of the audience is crucial in shaping communication dynamics, leading to distinct vocal dynamics for infants and older adults. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Neuroimaging studies have shown that aging alters the brain mechanisms underlying attentional control, even when behavioral performance is equivalent between younger and older adults. Instead of attributing these changes to compensatory mechanisms, we investigated whether age-related neuromodulatory changes in the locus coeruleus-noradrenaline (LC-NA) system are underlying these effects. To test whether aging leads to LC-NA system hyperactivity, we combined two methodological approaches: an oculomotor visual search task to assess eye movements and the threat of unpredictable electric shock paradigm to induce sustained arousal. Using pupillometry, we found that arousal reduced evoked pupil responses in both age groups, demonstrating the expected pattern of lower phasic noradrenergic activity under arousal. Young adults made significantly more first fixations to the physically salient distractor under threat of shock compared to baseline conditions, unlike in older adults with no effect. This modulation of attentional priority was only observable immediately following shock delivery and dissipated over time. Additionally, we found moderate evidence supporting the null hypothesis that arousal does not modulate the speed of attention processing in either age group. These results suggest that arousal selectively modulates attentional priority maps in the early visual cortex but does not influence broader interactions across higher order attentional networks. While first fixation measures revealed age-related differences consistent with the hypothesis of LC-NA system hyperactivity in aging, pupillometry and processing speed measures showed age-equivalent effects. Together, these findings highlight the potential for age-related changes in the LC-NA system to modulate mechanisms of attentional control and demonstrate the utility of eye movement measures as a promising tool to track changes across the adult lifespan. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Navigational skills are essential for interacting with our environment, supported by multiple types of spatial representations. We investigated age-related differences in spatial memory using a virtual reality task that manipulated viewpoints between the encoding and retrieval of one or four-object locations. The task investigates compensatory mechanisms in aging, specifically how spatial updating via self-motion affects spatial memory. We tested 21 young adults (ages 19-36) and 23 older adults (ages 63-80). The task involved three movement conditions: same-viewpoint condition, where participants walked away and returned to the same viewpoint; shifted-viewpoint (walking) condition where participants walked to a different viewpoint, enabling continuous updates of their egocentric representations through self-motion; and shifted-viewpoint (teleport) condition where participants teleported to the other viewpoint, involving both a virtual translation and rotation of the participant's view. Retrieval was tested by asking participants to place each object at its previously seen location. Average displacement error was affected by age group, object configuration, and movement condition, with an interaction between age and movement condition. Differences in movement conditions were primarily driven by older participants, who were most accurate from the same viewpoint. In shifted-viewpoint conditions, teleportation-where self-motion cues were absent-led to significantly greater errors than walking in the older group. Our results highlight the role of spatial updating in supporting spatial memory and suggest that age-related decline in allocentric representations can be mitigated by continuous updating of egocentric representations by self-motion. We speculate that the use of spatial updating might be impaired early in the progression to Alzheimer's dementia due to entorhinal cortical pathology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

A leading hypothesis in the field of aging and navigation is that older adults are selectively impaired on tasks that require allocentric (landmark-based) strategies to navigate, resulting in a shift toward more egocentric (self-based) strategies. However, most evidence in humans comes from studies that restrict body-based sensorimotor cues that are essential to both egocentric and allocentric navigation. In the present study, young and older adults navigated a virtual environment in each of two conditions: a stationary desktop condition that relied on visual input and an immersive condition that enabled unrestricted ambulation and sensorimotor feedback during navigation. Both age groups performed worse when initially learning locations from novel compared with familiar locations-often considered a hallmark of allocentric navigation. The cost of switching from familiar to novel start locations was equal between age groups, pointing to a null effect of age on allocentric strategies. Older adults also employed distal landmarks to a comparable extent to young adults, suggesting that landmark-dependent strategies did not differ by age. However, older adults were more likely to replicate previously taken paths, potentially indicative of a preference for egocentric strategies. The path replication effect was significantly attenuated in the immersive condition, particularly in the presence of geometric boundary cues that could be used to infer distance. Age differences in spatial navigation may therefore be driven in part by a selective bias for navigating familiar routes, although these differences were lessened in the presence of multimodal visual and sensorimotor cues. The present study highlights that navigation is a complex cognitive construct that draws on multiple parallel systems and strategies that cannot be easily explained by a simple allocentric-egocentric dichotomy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

When young adults complete a pretest (e.g., star-?) before to-be-learned material is studied (e.g., star-night), their recall of the material is typically enhanced on a subsequent final test compared to material studied without initial pretesting. The present two experiments investigated whether this pretesting effect arises also in older adults and is modulated in size when repeated guessing attempts are made during pretesting. Sixty young adults (mean age = 24.5 years) and 60 older adults (mean age = 68.6 years) took part in Experiment 1, while 54 young adults (mean age = 21.8 years) and 54 older adults (mean age = 66.6 years) took part in Experiment 2. Results showed that, like young adults, older adults can benefit from a single guessing attempt made during pretesting, both when weakly associated word pairs (Experiment 1) and prose passages (Experiment 2) were used as study material. However, multiple guessing attempts during pretesting led to an additional recall benefit when word pairs but not when prose passages had been studied. Experiment 2 also examined possible transfer effects of pretesting and showed a lack of transfer to previously studied but untested information, for both young and older adults. The results are discussed with respect to prominent accounts of the pretesting effect. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

This study examined how prefrontal overactivation in older adults relates to cognitive performance across systematically varied task demands, testing predictions from major neural compensation theories. Using a visual discrimination paradigm, we parametrically manipulated perceptual load, discrimination precision, and response rule complexity. Participants included younger (N = 36; aged 19-33) and older adults (N = 36; aged 56-82). Task performance was measured using inverse efficiency scores (IES), and functional magnetic resonance imaging assessed brain activation. Older adults demonstrated disproportionately higher IES, especially under the most complex condition, suggesting reduced efficiency with rising demand. fMRI revealed widespread frontoparietal network activation differences, with older adults showing increased recruitment of frontal regions compared with younger adults, especially at higher task demands. Critically, prefrontal overactivation in older adults correlated negatively with performance at the highest demand level, indicating capacity-limited compensation. Additionally, older adults exhibited reduced default mode network suppression and diminished dorsal attention network recruitment, both of which were associated with poorer task performance. These findings support the compensation-related utilization of neural circuits hypothesis, which predicts a transition from adaptive to inefficient recruitment as cognitive demands increase. They also align with broader frameworks such as the posterior-anterior shift in aging and the revised scaffolding theory of aging and cognition, emphasizing the role of task complexity in shaping compensatory patterns. Overall, the adaptiveness of neural overactivation in older adults appears to depend on its relationship to both task demands and behavioral performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The Iowa Gambling Task is a common tool for assessing complex decision making in healthy adults and clinical populations. Previous work has found that performance varies among younger adults, cognitively healthy older adults, and individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a syndrome often precedes dementia. However, performance on the task depends on many factors, including risk preference, sensitivity to gains and losses, and memory for past outcomes, which makes it difficult to understand what causes these differences. Here, we fit a computational cognitive model to the data which allows us to attribute differences in behavior to specific cognitive mechanisms. Experiment 1 (N = 90) compares cognitively healthy older adults to those with MCI, while Experiment 2 (N = 1,645) compares healthy adults of all ages. We find that healthy older adults and those with MCI exhibit different profiles in the task. Healthy aging is associated with a larger learning rates (we attribute to a recency bias), use of a perseverative strategy, and increased sensitivity to gains over losses. Individuals with MCI learned at a slower rate, but showed no qualitative differences in task strategy. The results have implications for understanding why decision making is impaired in the earliest clinical phases of cognitive decline. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

This study investigated the role of cumulative automatization in supporting complex logical reasoning, with a specific focus on age-related differences between younger and older adults. Grounded in the cumulative and emerging automatic deficit model, the research explores how the gradual automatization of cognitive subroutines influences higher order problem-solving abilities. Participants (N = 68), divided into two age groups, completed associative learning tasks using Chinese ideograms followed by inductive reasoning problems of increasing complexity. Behavioral data revealed that greater automatization-measured by faster reaction times, fewer errors, and reduced attempts-facilitates more efficient cognitive processing. While older adults showed slower acquisition and higher cognitive load during the learning phases, their performance in complex reasoning tasks aligned with that of younger participants once automatization was achieved. These results suggest that automatization acts as a cognitive buffer, enhancing reasoning efficiency by offloading controlled processes. Findings emphasize the importance of targeting automatization in cognitive training programs, especially in aging populations, and support a dynamic model of interaction between automatic and controlled cognitive mechanisms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).