Psychology and Aging最新文献

Speech is essential for everyday communication during the entire lifespan of an individual. Visual lip movement can support auditory speech perception, particularly in noisy environments and among older adults with hearing impairments. This study investigated whether visual information is integrated with auditory phonetic information without visual awareness and how this process changes with age. Participants heard low signal-to-noise monosyllables (/ba/, /da/, or /ga/) accompanied by visual lip movements under either visible or invisible conditions, the latter being achieved using continuous flash suppression. Three types of visual stimuli were used: incongruent (eliciting the McGurk effect), congruent, and no-lip movements. Participants identified the syllable they heard on each trial. Under continuous flash suppression, stimulus visibility was assessed via subjective reports in Experiment 1 and a four-alternative choice line localization task in Experiment 2. In both experiments, the McGurk effect was observed in both age groups under the visible conditions but only in younger adults under continuous flash suppression. These findings suggest that younger adults can integrate visual and auditory phonetic information without visual awareness, whereas this process may decline with age and be replaced by a more effortful, conscious mechanism-at least under low auditory signal-to-noise conditions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Repetition learning has been frequently studied using the Hebb effect: Immediate serial recall performance improves for a memory list which is repeated among other, nonrepeated lists. Previous research has suggested that older adults learn as well as younger adults in the Hebb paradigm. Because older adults show an age-related deficit in associative episodic memory, this suggests that learning in the Hebb paradigm is not driven by associative memory. In fact, it has been shown that learning sequentially presented lists through repetition is likely to be driven by a chunking mechanism, by which the whole list is integrated into a single unified representation. Here, we investigate age differences in the Hebb paradigm to determine the conditions under which repetition learning relies on associative episodic memory. We found that older adults learn at the same rate as younger adults in a standard Hebb paradigm with lists of letters and lists of words, as well as in a modified version in which a coherent segment of a list is repeated at varying positions within a list. By contrast, Hebb repetition learning of pairwise associations of words was slower in older than in younger adults. Our results suggest that (a) repetition learning is only driven by associative memory when learning pairwise associations is required to solve the task and (b) older adults' capability to learn from repetition is as good as that of younger adults when memory lists are presented in sequence. Thus, the process of chunk formation is largely preserved in old age, at least in the verbal domain. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Global motion perception (GMP) is essential for tasks such as navigation, speed judgment, and motion-based obstacle avoidance. Previous research has identified sex-asynchronous aging in GMP, with older women showing a more pronounced decline in global motion efficiency than older men. However, the underlying visual mechanisms remain unclear. In this study, random-dot kinematograms and the perceptual template model were employed to investigate the visual noise mechanisms contributing to sex differences in GMP aging. By comparing the differences in visual noise between 106 younger adults (66 women) and 94 older adults (55 women), this study found that, compared to younger adults, both older men and women exhibited a shared aging mechanism characterized by increased internal additive noise and deficits in external noise exclusion. However, further analysis indicated that older women had significantly higher internal noise levels and greater deficits in external noise exclusionthan older men. Moreover, the increase in internal noise was significantly greater than the decrease in external noise exclusion, suggesting that elevated internal noise is the primary factor driving their more pronounced perceptual decline. To our knowledge, this study is the first to apply the perceptual template model to reveal the visual noise mechanisms underlying sex differences in the aging of GMP, offering new insights into the influence of age and sex on motion perception. These findings also provide guidance for potential strategies to improve visual perception in older adults by targeting changes in noise processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Stimulus-response (S-R) modality compatibility refers to the mapping between the stimulus modality and the modality of the response-related sensory consequences. Previous studies found larger costs of task switching with modality-incompatible mappings (auditory-manual and visual-vocal) compared to modality-compatible mappings (auditory-vocal and visual-manual). The aim of the present study was to investigate whether older adults show increased effects of modality compatibility in task switching and whether this age-related performance difference can be reduced with sufficient preparation time. Young adults (n = 44, M_age = 20.6 years) and older adults (n = 44, M_age = 70.9 years) were presented with simultaneous auditory and visual stimuli (i.e., bimodal stimulation) both at the same side or at different sides. In each trial, the target modality was indicated by a preceding cue in the target modality (i.e., auditory or visual target), which could switch versus repeat from trial to trial. Participants responded to the position of the target either manually or vocally based on prior instructions and the cue, while the cue-target interval was varied to examine task-set preparation. Importantly, in modality-compatible blocks, visual targets were mapped to manual responses and auditory targets to vocal responses, whereas this mapping was reversed in modality-incompatible blocks. Older adults showed both larger mixing costs and larger switch costs generally, and both types of costs were also larger with modality-incompatible mappings. Longer preparation time led to generally reduced switch costs, but this was not age-specific. Together, the data suggest that shielding against modality-specific crosstalk is impaired in older adults in contexts requiring updating of multimodal modality mappings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Accurately recognizing the emotional prosody of others is crucial for effective social interactions, yet this ability notably declines as individuals age, particularly in individuals with age-related hearing loss. To further understand how aging and hearing loss affect older adults' recognition patterns and to investigate potential contributors, the present study recruited 32 older adults with normal hearing, 26 older adults with age-related hearing loss, 30 younger adults with simulated hearing loss, and 30 younger adults with normal hearing to identify vocal emotions portrayed in semantically neutral Chinese words. Accuracy was analyzed using generalized linear mixed-effects models to assess the impact of aging and hearing loss. Multiple linear regression explored the contributions of age, low- and high-frequency hearing sensitivity, cognitive scores, and education level. The influence of Mandarin lexical tones on emotional prosody perception was also investigated. Results showed older adults with hearing loss had the lowest accuracy, followed by older adults with normal hearing. Younger adults with simulated hearing loss outperformed both older groups but lagged behind younger adults with normal hearing. Happiness and fear were particularly challenging emotions for individuals with hearing loss. Flat and rising tones enhanced happiness recognition, while falling tones improved sadness recognition. High-frequency hearing loss, cognitive scores, and years of education are significant contributors to older adults' performance. These findings reveal that older age and hearing loss are associated with reduced sensitivity to emotional prosody. Furthermore, the pattern of emotional prosody perception appears to differ across emotions and is related to individual differences in sensory, cognitive, and social factors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Producing coherent discourse requires us to regulate the content of our speech and avoid interference from discourse-irrelevant concepts that become active in semantic memory. The inhibitory deficit hypothesis proposes that coherence declines in later life are due to a reduced ability to inhibit these irrelevant ideas. However, the existing evidence in support of this view is correlational. We performed an experimental test of the hypothesis by asking young (18-25) and older (70-90) participants to produce discourse on a range of topics while attending to two types of visual distractors: images of meaningful concepts and meaningless abstract patterns. The overall global coherence of responses was lower when participants were distracted (cf. no distraction) but this effect was not larger for meaningful distractors. Participants also spoke more slowly under distraction. These effects did not differ between age groups. Critically, however, in the meaningful distractor condition, responses diverged from the original topic more quickly than in the other conditions. This effect was only present in older participants. These results suggest two underlying effects at play. First, performing a concurrent task has a general effect on the speed and coherence of discourse, which in this study was age-invariant. Second, for older people, tasks that activate a series of irrelevant semantic representations have an additional cumulative effect on discourse content, causing it to deviate off topic more rapidly. Our results support the inhibitory deficit hypothesis and suggest that older people can improve their coherence by avoiding semantically laden environmental distractors like TV or radio programes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Cognitive interventions demonstrate promising evidence for minimizing cognitive decline in older adults yet are often criticized for their lack of ecological validity. We designed a real-life intervention using mobile-based shopping applications over 22 weeks and examined its effects on cognitive function. We recruited 102 healthy Malaysian older adults (M_age = 66.18, SD = 4.95) who were randomly assigned to three conditions: experimental, active control, and passive control. The first two groups had weekly sessions but not the latter. The experimental group completed tasks designed to assess inhibition and working memory-updating using online shopping applications (trained applications) with varying difficulty levels, whereas active control participants freely interacted with the same applications without any training instructions. All groups completed assessment sessions in the baseline, posttest, and a 1-month follow-up, including noncomputerized versions of Stroop, Digit Span, and the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test, and an untrained application (Tripadvisor) measuring inhibition and working memory-updating. Data were analyzed using Bayesian analysis of variance and multivariate multiple regression. Results showed that the experimental group performed better in the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test-3 s compared to the passive control, suggesting training gains in working memory-updating. The experimental group performed better in inhibition and working memory-updating in the untrained application compared to both control groups, indicating a near transfer effect. In summary, our findings provide evidence that cognitive stimulation by tasks using online shopping activities on mobile phones is beneficial for older adults' cognitive function. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

In this article, we examine parental regret, which is a domain-specific regret about one's own parenting history. In Study 1, we present a short questionnaire on parental regret and determine its construct validity and short-term stability in a sample of parents of adult children (N_T1 = 286, N_T2 = 120; 10-day interval; 71.5% women; age range = 42-74 years). The factor structure of parental regret was best depicted by a general and omission parental regret model. Furthermore, we found that parental regret was related to but not interchangeable with other regret concepts or dispositional pessimism. Study 2 examines parental regret's association with the longing for grandparenthood (N = 450 parents of adult children; 73.0% women; age range = 40-81 years; no grandchildren yet). We argue that regrets about how one behaved during one's children's childhood can lead one to resort to fantasies about idealized realities with future grandchildren, expressed in a longing for grandparenthood. As hypothesized, stronger parental regret was associated with stronger longing for grandparenthood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

The well-validated two-high threshold eyewitness identification model was applied to examine age-related differences in the cognitive processes underlying eyewitness responses to sequential lineups. In the first step, a large data set originally collected for a different purpose was reanalyzed to examine age-related differences in culprit-presence detection, culprit-absence detection, and guessing-based selection among young to middle-aged adults, young-old adults, and old-old adults. In the second step, a novel experiment was conducted to test the robustness of the conclusions from the reanalysis. The results of both analyses are fairly consistent. The probabilities of memory-based culprit-presence detection and, to some degree, culprit-absence detection decrease with age. In contrast, the probability of guessing-based selection increases with age. This shift from memory-based detection to guessing-based selection highlights potential challenges for the validity of eyewitness testimony posed by age-related differences in the cognitive processes underlying eyewitness responses. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Black Americans a have higher risk of cognitive impairment relative to other racial/ethnic groups, and Black women have the highest prevalence of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias; however, the mechanisms underlying cognitive impairment are poorly understood. Neighborhood-level exposures that adversely influence cognitive aging may be distinct for Black women given historical and contemporary structural racism and sexism and their influence on neighborhood environments, which, in turn, adversely affect the cognitive health of Black women. This study examined the cross-sectional association between the Area Deprivation Index (ADI) and subjective cognitive function among 20,768 Black Women's Health Study cohort participants (M_age = 64.6, SD = 7.22). Multinomial logistic regression was used to calculate odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals for moderate (1-2 concerns) and poor (≥ 3 concerns) versus good (0 concerns) subjective cognitive function associated with quintiles of ADI ascertained in 2015. In the unadjusted model, greater neighborhood disadvantage was associated with subjective cognitive impairment. However, this association was fully attenuated after adjusting for education. Results suggest neighborhood-level disadvantage, as measured by the ADI, is not associated with increased cognitive concerns after accounting for education among Black women. Although the ADI is well-established as a correlate of many health outcomes, primarily in White individuals, it has rarely been used in samples of exclusively Black individuals. Different measures of the neighborhood environment may be more pertinent for differentiating risk among Black women or for predicting subjective cognitive function. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).