Psychology and Aging最新文献

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) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotion control beliefs reflect the extent to which people believe their emotions can and should be controlled and have been linked to psychological well-being. However, research has yet to examine age-related differences in these beliefs and their daily associations with well-being. Accordingly, the present research examines age differences in daily emotion control beliefs and their within-person associations with positive and negative affect. To do so, we used 14-day daily diary data from an adult community sample (younger adults: 18-36 years old, N = 72; older adults: 66-92 years old, N = 66). The results revealed that older adults reported higher average can emotion control beliefs than younger adults, but no age differences were observed for average should emotion control beliefs. Further, multilevel models revealed that, in general, having stronger beliefs that one can control their emotions was associated with higher positive affect and lower negative affect across age, whereas having stronger beliefs that one should control their emotions was only associated with higher negative affect in younger adults. Examining daily variations, while both age groups also experienced significant increases in positive affect and decreases in negative affect on days they believed they could control their emotion more than usual, the daily association with positive affect was stronger among young adults. Further, younger, but not older, adults experienced decreases in positive affect and increases in negative affect on days in which they believed they should control their emotions more than usual, while older adults' affect did not significantly change. These findings add to theory and research on lifespan development and emotional aging by highlighting that emotion control beliefs are differentially associated with well-being, and these associations change across the adult lifespan. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Many individuals believe that they can detect lies; however, empirical evidence indicates the opposite: Humans are poor lie detectors. This overestimation of lie detection performance has predominantly been studied in young adults. Yet older adults might exhibit such biases to an even higher extent due to their age-related changes in visual and cognitive processing. Accordingly, we tested 18- to 36-year-old (n = 221) and 55- to 91-year-old (n = 109) adults in their (a) self-reported lie detection performance, (b) actual lie detection performance, (c) confidence in their judgments, and (d) lie detection cues they normally rely on. Lie detection was assessed based on videos of a person being truthful or lying when describing a picture. This study showed that older and younger adults did not differ in their actual and self-reported lie detection performances. However, older adults seemed more realistic about their performance in comparison to others and confident with their decisions. The predicted age-related differences were also not found. Both groups overestimated their self-reported lie detection performance around chance level and showed the same tendency to rely more on nonverbal than verbal cues. For age differences, older adults (a) reported higher confidence in their lie detection judgements, (b) performed lower in self-reported lie detection, and (c) used fewer cues to detect lies. Future studies should enhance the ecological validity of the study material, providing more context information and creating higher stakes for participants. Overall, understanding lie detection performance and biases across the lifespan can inform interventions aimed at improving deception detection accuracy across different age groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

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).