Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition最新文献

Aging can impact emotional recognition, affecting older adults' mental health and social function. This study examined how aging affects affective prosody comprehension (APC: understanding emotions through speech) across seven emotions (happiness, surprise, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and neutrality) and its relationship with cognitive function (via the Montreal Cognitive Assessment) and social support (via the Social Support Rating Scale) in 199 cognitively normal older adults. We found that older adults had lower APC accuracy and more errors, often mistaking negative emotions for neutral or positive ones. APC accuracy was significantly associated with social support, and a partial least squares (PLS) cognitive component fully mediated the relationship between the APC component and social support utilization, explaining 61.7% of the total effect. These results suggest that declines in APC during aging are linked to social support utilization through cognitive function, offering insights for interventions to improve social and cognitive health in older adults.

Reasoning can be fast, automatic, and intuitive or slow, deliberate, and analytical. Use of one cognitive reasoning style over the other has broad implications for beliefs, but differences in cognitive style have not previously been reported in those with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Here, the cognitive reflection test is used to measure cognitive style in healthy older adults and those with MCI. Those with MCI performed worse than cognitively healthy older adults, indicating they are more likely to engage in intuitive thinking than age-matched adults. This association is reliable after controlling for additional cognitive, self-report, and demographic factors. Across all measures, subjective cognitive decline was the best predictor of cognitive status. A difference in cognitive style represents a novel behavioral marker of MCI, and future work should explore whether this explains a broader pattern of reasoning errors in those with MCI, such as susceptibility to scams or impaired financial reasoning.

Remembering our decisions is crucial - it allows us to learn from past mistakes and construct future behavior. However, it is unclear if age-related memory declines impact the memorability of older adults' decisions. Here, we compared younger and older adults' ability to remember their decisions. In Studies 1 and 2, participants made choices between two objects based on their star rating (shopping context) or circle count (neutral context) and later remembered what they chose. while Study 3 tested participants' memory for active vs. passive decisions. Overall, we found no evidence for age differences in the ability to remember decisions. Furthermore, age did not interact with context - both similarly benefitted from making and remembering their decisions in a more shopping-like context. These results reveal an aspect of cognition that appears to be preserved in healthy aging. Highlighting such aspects can help improve older adults' self-perceptions and reframe the narrative around aging.

Compared to younger adults, older adults show a reduced difference in memory between items they are directed to remember and items they are directed to forget. This effect may result from increased processing of goal-irrelevant information in aging. In contrast, healthy older adults are often able to selectively remember valuable information, suggesting preservation of goal-directed encoding in aging. Here, we examined how value may differentially affect directed-forgetting and memory for irrelevant details for younger and older adults in a value-directed remembering task. In Experiment 1, participants studied words paired with a directed-forgetting cue and a point-value they earned for later recognition. Participants' memory was then tested, either after an 8-min or 24-hr retention interval. In Experiment 2 words were presented in two colors and the recognition test assessed whether the participant could retrieve the incidentally-presented point value and the color of each recognized words. In both experiments, older and younger adults displayed a comparable ability to selectively encode valuable items. However, older adults showed a reduced directed-forgetting effect compared to younger adults that was maintained across the 24-hr retention interval. In Experiment 2, older adults showed both intact directed-forgetting and similar incidental detail retrieval compared to younger adults. These findings suggest that older adults maintained selectivity to value, demonstrating that aging does not impact the differential encoding of valuable information. Furthermore, younger and older adults may be similarly goal-directed in terms of item features to encode, but that instructions to forget presented items are less effective in older adults.

Metacognition entails knowledge of one's own cognitive skills, perceived self-efficacy and locus of control when performing a task, and performance monitoring. Age-related changes in metacognition have been observed in metamemory, whereas their occurrence for hearing remained unknown. We tested 30 older and 30 younger adults with typical hearing, to assess if age reduces metacognition for hearing sentences in noise. Metacognitive monitoring for older and younger adults was overall comparable. In fact, the older group achieved better monitoring for words in the second part of the phrase. Additionally, only older adults showed a correlation between performance and perceived confidence. No age differentiation was found for locus of control, knowledge or self-efficacy. This suggests intact metacognitive skills for hearing in noise in older adults, alongside a somewhat paradoxical overconfidence in younger adults. These findings support exploiting metacognition for older adults dealing with noisy environments, since metacognition is central for implementing self-regulation strategies.

To diagnose mild cognitive impairment, it is crucial to understand whether subjective cognitive complaints reflect objective cognitive deficits. This question has mostly been investigated in the memory domain, with mixed results. Our study was one of the first to address it for language. Participants were 55-to-93-year-old memory clinic patients (n = 163). They filled in a questionnaire about subjective language and memory complaints and performed two language tasks (naming-by-definition and sentence comprehension). Greater language complaints were associated with two language measures, thus showing a moderate value in predicting language performance. Greater relative severity of language versus memory complaints was a better predictor, associated with three language performance measures. Surprisingly, greater memory complaints were associated with better naming, probably due to anosognosia in further disease progression or personality-related factors. Our findings highlight the importance of relative complaint severity across domains and, clinically, call for developing self-assessment questionnaires asking specific questions about multiple cognitive functions.

The literature on the relationship between social interaction and executive functions (EF) in older age is mixed, perhaps stemming from differences in EF measures and the conceptualization/measurement of social interaction. We investigated the relationship between social interaction and EF in 102 cognitively unimpaired older adults (ages 65-90). Participants received an EF battery to measure working memory, inhibition, shifting, and global EF. We measured loneliness subjectively through survey and social isolation objectively through naturalistic observation. Loneliness was not significantly related to any EF measure (p-values = .13-.65), nor was social isolation (p-values = .11-.69). Bayes factors indicated moderate to extremely strong evidence (BF₀₁ = 8.70 to BF₀₁ = 119.49) in support of no relationship..   Overall, these findings suggest that, among cognitively healthy older adults, there may not be a robust cross-sectional relationship between EF and subjective loneliness or objective social isolation.

Feature-based attention allows to efficiently guide attention to relevant information in the visual scene, but unambiguous empirical evidence on age-related effects is still limited. In this study, young and older participants performed a two-alternative forced choice task in which a response was selected based on a task-relevant number (=target) presented alone or with a task-irrelevant letter (=neutral distracter) or number (=compatible/incompatible distracter). Participants were required to select the target based on color. To compare the behavioral interference of the distracters between the age groups, data were modeled with a hierarchical drift-diffusion model. The results revealed that decreases in the rate at which information was collected in the conditions with versus without a distracter were more pronounced in the older than young age group when the distracter was compatible or incompatible. Our findings are consistent with an age-related decline in the ability to filter out distracters based on features.

Retrieval practice can reduce associative memory deficits for older adults but they underutilize this potent learning tool during self-regulated learning. The current experiment investigated whether teaching older adults to use retrieval practice more can improve their self-regulated learning. Younger and older adults made decisions about when to study, how often to engage in retrieval practice, and when to stop learning a list of medication-side effect pairs. Some younger and older adults received instructions before learning that emphasized the mnemonic benefits of retrieval practice over restudying material and described how to schedule retrieval practice to learn to a goal criterion level. This minimal intervention was effective for improving both younger and older adults' associative memory. These data indicate that a simple strategy for improving older adults self-regulated learning is to provide them with instructions that teach them how to use criterion learning to schedule their retrieval practice for to-be learned material.

It is well known that difficulty in the retrieval of people's names is an early symptom of Alzheimer's Disease Dementia (ADD), but there is a controversy about the nature of this deficit. In this study, we analyzed whether the nature of the difficulty in retrieving proper names in ADD reflects pre-semantic, semantic, or post-semantic difficulties. To do so, 85 older adults, 35 with ADD and 50 cognitively healthy (CH), completed a task with famous faces involving: recognition, naming, semantic questions, and naming with phonological cues. The ADD group scored lower than the CH group in all tasks. Both groups showed a greater capacity for recognition than naming, but this difference was more pronounced in the ADD group. Additionally, the ADD group showed significantly fewer semantic errors than the CH group. Overall results suggest that the difficulties people with ADD have in naming reflect a degradation at semantic level.