Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition最新文献

Navigational abilities decline with age, but the cognitive underpinnings of this cognitive decline remain partially understood. Navigation is guided by landmarks and self-motion cues, that we address when estimating our location. These sources of spatial information are often associated with noise and uncertainty, thus posing a challenge during navigation. To overcome this challenge, humans and other species rely on navigational cues according to their reliability: reliable cues are highly weighted and therefore strongly influence our spatial behavior, compared to less reliable ones. We hypothesize that older adults do not efficiently weigh spatial cues, and accordingly, the reliability levels of navigational cues may not modulate their spatial behavior, as with younger adults. To test this, younger and older adults performed a virtual navigational task, subject to modified reliability of landmarks and self-motion cues. The findings revealed that while increased reliability of spatial cues improved navigational performance across both age groups, older adults exhibited diminished sensitivity to changes in landmark reliability. The findings demonstrate a cognitive mechanism that could lead to impaired navigation abilities in older adults.

This study had two research objectives. The first was to examine age-related differences in the fluency of speech outputs, as prior research contains conflicting findings concerning whether older adults produce more disfluency than younger adults. The second was to examine cognitive individual differences, and their relationship with the production of disfluency. One hundred and fifty-four adults completed a story re-telling task, and a battery of cognitive measures. Results showed that younger adults produced more um's and fewer repetitions. For individual differences, results showed that inhibition and set shifting were related to the production of repetitions, and inhibition and working memory were related to uh production. Our results provide clarification about mixed findings with respect age and disfluency production. The individual differences provide clarification on theoretical arguments for disfluent speech in aging (e.g. Inhibition Deficit Hypothesis), and also sheds light on the role of executive functions in models of language production.

People often engage in the selective remembering of valuable or important information, whether strategic and/or automatic. We examined potential age-related differences in the automatic processing of value during encoding on later remembering by presenting participants with words paired with point values (range: 1-10 twice or 1-20) to remember for a later test. On the first three lists, participants were told that they would receive the points associated with each word if they recalled it on the test (their goal was to maximize their score). On the last three lists, we told participants that all words were worth the same number of points if recalled on the tests, thus making the point value paired with each word meaningless. Results revealed that selective memory may be impaired in older adults using procedures with larger value ranges. Additionally, we demonstrated that the automatic effects of value may have a greater effect on younger adults relative to older adults, but there may be instances where older adults also exhibit these automatic effects. Finally, strategic and automatic processes may not be related within each learner, suggesting that these processes may rely on different cognitive mechanisms. This indicates that these processes could be underpinned by distinct cognitive mechanisms: strategic processes might engage higher-level cognitive operations like imagery, while automatic processes appear to be more perceptually driven.

Objective: Past research has shown that self-reported everyday strategy use and task-specific strategy use are related to associative memory performance in aging. Understudied is the relationship between these types of strategy use, whether they predict associative memory performance, and how this may differ across genders.

Method: A sample of older adults (N = 566, 53% female, ages 60-80) completed this online study. Study measures included 1. Multifactorial Memory Questionnaire (MMQ) Strategy Use subscale, a self-report measure of everyday strategy use, 2. Face-Name Task (FNT), a measure of associative memory, and 3. self-initiated number and types of strategies used on the FNT. Analyses examined the interrelationships among all study measures and their relative contributions to FNT performance while accounting for intraindividual factors.

Results: Participants who reported using more strategies on the FNT performed better than those who used fewer or no strategies; those who reported using at least three strategies and relating FNT to past experience performed best. Women outperformed men on the FNT but did not differ in task-specific strategy use. Participants who reported using no strategies on the FNT had lower MMQ Strategy Use scores. A multiple regression analysis indicated that female gender and using at least two task strategies were significant predictors of greater FNT performance.

Conclusions: The results indicate that task-specific strategy use relates more to associative memory performance than to everyday strategy use, but neither accounts for the female advantage in FNT performance. Findings encourage querying task-specific strategy use to contextualize age-related associative memory decline.

While cognitive aging research has compared episodic memory accuracy between younger and older adults, less work has described differences in how memories are encoded and recalled. This is important for memories of real-world experiences, since there is immense variability in which details can be accessed and organized into narratives. We investigated age effects on the organization and content of memory for complex events. In two independent samples (N = 45; 60), young and older adults encoded and recalled the same short-movie. We applied a novel scoring on the recollections to quantify recall accuracy, temporal organization (temporal contiguity, forward asymmetry), and content (perceptual, conceptual). No age-effects on recall accuracy nor on metrics of temporal organization emerged. Older adults provided more conceptual and non-episodic content, whereas younger adults reported a higher proportion of event-specific information. Our results indicate that age-related differences in episodic recall reflect distinctions in what details are assembled from the past.

It is not well understood how neighborhood disadvantage is associated with specific domains of cognitive function and underlying brain health within older adults. Thus, the objective was to examine associations between neighborhood disadvantage, brain health, and cognitive performance, and examine whether associations were more pronounced among women. The study included 136 older adults who underwent cognitive testing and MRI. Neighborhood disadvantage was characterized using the Area Deprivation Index (ADI). Descriptive statistics, bivariate correlations, and multiple regressions were run. Multiple regressions, adjusted for age, sex, education, and depression, showed that higher ADI state rankings (greater disadvantage) were associated with poorer working memory performance (p < .01) and lower hippocampal volumes (p < .01), but not total, frontal, and white matter lesion volumes, nor visual and verbal memory performance. There were no significant sex interactions. Findings suggest that greater neighborhood disadvantage may play a role in working memory and underlying brain structure.

The current study evaluated the reliability and validity of a novel, performance-based banking task in 60 younger (18-34 years) and 60 older (50-85 years) adults. All participants completed the Telephone-based Daily Instrumental Activities of Living (T-DIAL) using interactive voice response technology to complete a series of mock actions with a financial institution via telephone. The T-DIAL showed strong inter-rater reliability and internal consistency. T-DIAL accuracy was significantly and independently related to better self-reported instrumental activities of daily living and executive functions at a large effect size. Findings from this study provided preliminary supportive evidence for the reliability and validity of the T-DIAL, which had robust associations with manifest everyday functioning and higher-order cognitive ability. Future work is needed on the psychometrics (e.g. test-retest reliability, normative standards), and construct validity (e.g. diagnostic accuracy) of the T-DIAL in neurocognitive disorders and under-served communities for whom remote evaluations might be particularly relevant.

Shared cognitive processes underlie our ability to remember the past (i.e., episodic memory) and imagine the future (i.e., episodic simulation) and age-related declines in episodic memory are also noted when simulating future scenarios. Given older adults' reduced cognitive control and protracted memory retrieval time, we examined whether imposing time limits on episodic simulation of future helping scenarios affects younger and older adults' willingness to help, phenomenological experience, and the type of details produced. Relative to a control task, episodic simulation increased younger and older participants' willingness to help, scene vividness, and perspective-taking regardless of the time spent imagining future helping scenarios. Notably, time spent imagining influenced the number, but not proportion of internal details produced, suggesting that participants' use of episodic-like information remained consistent regardless of the time they spent imagining. The present findings highlight the importance of collecting phenomenological experience when assessing episodic simulation abilities across the lifespan.

While previous work has shown a positive relationship between cognitive performance and lifestyle factors in younger adults, evidence for this relationship among middle-aged and older adults has been mixed. The current study aimed to further test the relationship among physical activity, sleep quality, and memory performance in middle-aged and older adults, and to test whether this relationship holds up during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results showed that physical activity was associated with better sleep quality and better working memory performance, and better sleep quality was associated with better working memory and self-perceptions of everyday memory abilities. Additionally, we found that the effects of physical activity on working memory were partially mediated by sleep quality. While these effects were small and only correlational in nature, they lend further support to the notion that sleep quality and physical activity are beneficial to memory later in life, even during a global pandemic.

Spatial navigation deficits are often observed among older adults on tasks that require navigating virtual reality (VR) environments on a computer screen. We investigated whether these age differences are attenuated when tested in more naturalistic and ambulatory virtual environments. In Experiment 1, young and older adults navigated a variant of the Morris Water Maze task in each of two VR conditions: a desktop VR condition which required using a mouse and keyboard to navigate, and an ambulatory VR condition which permitted unrestricted locomotion. In Experiment 2, we examined whether age- and VR-related differences in spatial performance were affected by the inclusion of additional spatial cues. In both experiments, older adults navigated to target locations less precisely than younger individuals in the desktop condition. Age differences were significantly attenuated, however, when tested in the ambulatory VR environment. These findings underscore the importance of developing naturalistic assessments of spatial memory and navigation.