Age differences in cardiovascular and cognitive performance under noise conditions

Ambient white noise (80 dB), compared with quiet (52-dB) testing conditions, improved the performance of elderly and younger subjects on simple addition. Reliable age-related interactions were found on health measures of systolic and diastolic blood pressure, as well as heart rate. Heightened sensory conditions reduced the physiological measures of arousal in the younger group, whereas significant cardiovascular reactivity was found among the older group. The results are suggestive of the potential for increased cardiovascular risk as a function of sensory stimulation in the elderly despite improvements on cognitive tasks. Additional research is needed to evaluate the multidimensional effects of extended sensory stimulation on the elderly.     

多目标追踪在各类人群评价与训练中的应用

多目标追踪范式主要用来探讨动态情景下对多个目标的视觉注意和记忆加工过程, 早期研究侧重于追踪过程中的影响因素及加工机制。近年来, 越来越多的研究应用多目标追踪范式对各类人群进行评价与训练, 包括儿童、老年人、神经发育障碍患者、驾驶员、运动员、电子游戏玩家以及一些其他职业群体。总体来看, 多目标追踪表现越好, 在复杂快速的动态情境中的专业表现越好; 反之, 多目标追踪表现差, 标志着认知功能可能发育不成熟或出现衰退。并且, 多目标追踪还可作为认知训练的手段, 改善老年人和神经发育障碍患者的认知功能, 提高各职业人群的专业表现。未来, 多目标追踪作为评价和训练的方法还有很大的发展空间, 包括加强特殊职业人群的模拟训练, 扩展目标人群, 结合立体视觉和真实场景, 结合身体活动, 探索多人合作的多目标追踪, 拓展用于进行情绪和社会功能的评价与训练等。     

Psychosis: A Synthesis of Motivational and Defect Perspectives

Based on the evolution of human intelligence and the tremendous cognitive capacities arising from it, we have an innate tendency for the extreme thought content, thought form, and sensory perceptions of psychosis. During the conscious and awake state, cognitive regulatory control processes block these more extreme variants to facilitate reality congruency necessary for adaptive functioning. While asleep there is no need for reality congruency and the cognitive regulatory control processes are deactivated allowing psychotic equivalents to be expressed in dreams. This paper helps synthesize the two dominant perspectives regarding the etiology of psychosis: the neuroscience defect perspective and the psychoanalytic motivational perspective. Regarding the former, defective cognitive regulation arising from certain conditions, such as the deficit state of schizophrenia, allows extreme cognitive distortions, thought form variants, and sensory perceptual experiences to intrude into the conscious and awake state, thereby producing psychosis. Consistent with the psychoanalytic motivational perspective, defensive processes can motivate extreme cognitive distortions, thought form variants and sensory perceptual experiences, and also facilitate their expression by deactivating the relevant cognitive regulatory control processes.     

Listening in aging adults: from discourse comprehension to psychoacoustics.

Older adults, whether or not they have clinically significant hearing loss, have more trouble than their younger counterparts understanding speech in everyday life. These age-related difficulties in speech understanding may be attributed to changes in higher-level cognitive processes such as language comprehension, memory, attention, and cognitive slowing, or to lower-level sensory and perceptual processes. A complicating factor in determining how these sources might contribute to age-related declines in speech understanding is that they are highly correlated. Experimenters have typically focused either on cognitive declines or sensory declines in artificially optimized test conditions. In contrast, our approach focuses on the complex interactions between age-related changes in cognitive and perceptual factors that affect spoken language comprehension, especially in nonideal, realistic conditions. In this article, we describe our attempts to systematically investigate sensory-cognitive interactions in controlled experimental situations. We begin by looking at experimental conditions that closely approximate everyday listening, and show that older adults do indeed experience deficits in spoken language comprehension relative to younger adults in these conditions. We then review further experiments designed to isolate more precisely the cognitive and perceptual sources of these age-related differences and how they vary with listening condition. In large part, we find that age-related changes in speech understanding are a consequence of auditory declines.     

Mechanisms of synesthesia: cognitive and physiological constraints

Synesthesia is a conscious experience of systematically induced sensory attributes that are not experienced by most people under comparable conditions. Recent findings from cognitive psychology, functional brain imaging and electrophysiology have shed considerable light on the nature of synesthesia and its neurocognitive underpinnings. These cognitive and physiological findings are discussed with respect to a neuroanatomical framework comprising hierarchically organized cortical sensory pathways. We advance a neurobiological theory of synesthesia that fits within this neuroanatomical framework.     

The strong connection between sensory and cognitive performance in old age: not due to sensory acuity reductions operating during cognitive assessment

Cognitive aging research has documented a strong increase in the covariation between sensory and cognitive functioning with advancing age. In part, this finding may reflect sensory acuity reductions operating during cognitive assessment. To examine this possibility, the authors administered cognitive tasks used in prior studies (e.g., Lindenberger & Baltes, 1994) to middle-aged adults under age-simulation conditions of reduced visual acuity, auditory acuity, or both. Visual acuity was lowered through partial occlusion filters, and auditory acuity through headphone-shaped noise protectors. Acuity manipulations reduced visual acuity and auditory acuity in the speech range to values reaching or approximating old-age acuity levels, respectively, but did not lower cognitive performance relative to control conditions. Results speak against assessment-related sensory acuity accounts of the age-related increase in the connection between sensory and cognitive functioning and underscore the need to explore alternative explanations, including a focus on general aspects of brain aging.     

Visual function and cognitive aging: differential role of contrast sensitivity in verbal versus spatial tasks

Cognitive and sensory function are correlated in older adults. Sensory function may provide an index of neurological integrity (common-cause hypothesis). Declining sensory input may also directly impair cognition (direct-cause hypothesis). Accordingly, sensory function should more strongly predict cognitive performance and should account for more age-related variability in tasks with higher sensory demands. In a cross-sectional adult life span sample, visual contrast sensitivity was a better predictor and accounted for more of the age-related variability in high sensory-demand tasks, compared with low sensory-demand tasks, consistent with the direct-cause hypothesis. The results suggest a direct role for sensory function in cognitive aging when task conditions place heavy demands on sensory processing.     

Liens entre le déclin sensoriel et cognitif dans le vieillissement normal : revue critique de la littérature et apports de l’approche incarnée et située de la cognition

Biological aging impacts many organs including sensory's ones and the brain, and thus, cognition. Research has shown that the sensory and cognitive decline are positively correlated. The main data from this literature are firstly reviewed in the present article. Then, the four main hypotheses that are generally proposed to explain these associations are presented. According to them, sensory decline is supposed to cause cognitive decline, or vice-versa, or these concomitant changes result from the general alteration of the nervous system. However, none of them seems able to account for all of the existing data. Moreover, the precise mechanisms that may drive these associations remain to be clarified. The rest of the article is then dedicated to the embodied and situated cognition approach as it provides a particularly interesting and adequate framework to account for these links. Indeed, according to this approach, cognitive representations are grounded in their sensorimotor properties. In other words, cognitive functioning is not conceived as detached from sensory functioning, but instead directly dependent of it. Representations are thus thought to emerge from the sensorimotor simulation of the properties involved in these representations. Therefore, sensory decline should directly impact cognitive performance. It is then hypothesized that older adults have low-resolution representations decreasing the signal on noise ratio of traces, increasing sensorimotor interferences and thus decreasing cognitive performance. This approach leads to consider low and high levels of sensory and perceptual functioning, which are both impaired in aging. Therefore, the repercussion of the sensory-perceptual decline is not only valid for present processing, but also extend to all past knowledge. Several predictions are then proposed on (1) the link between high-level perceptual functioning and cognitive functioning in older adults; (2) the possible interaction in young adults between sensory and high-level perceptual functioning as a function of the level of interference of the material involved; (3) the possible link between the motor and cognitive functioning in older adults. The clinical consequences in terms of cognitive stimulation of such a perspective will close the article. It is proposed to develop a stimulation program based on pattern separation mechanism to better process sensory interference in order to train older adults to improve cognitive precision and thus performance.     

老年人情绪记忆中的积极效应及其产生机制

有关情绪与记忆的研究发现, 老年人经常表现出积极效应, 即对积极刺激的记忆比对消极刺激的记忆更好。从动机层面来讲, 社会情绪选择理论认为老年人比年轻人更倾向于进行情绪调节。在记忆任务中, 这种情绪调节的动机使得老年人具有表现出积极效应的倾向, 但这种倾向只有在满足一定条件的情况下才能表现出来。情绪调节对记忆的影响可以通过注意选择、加工资源分配、情绪抑制、认知再评价等多种方式进行。未来研究需要进一步细分年龄段考察情绪的各维度如何影响老年人记忆的各个阶段。     

消极元刻板印象激活对老年人认知表现的影响

本研究以59名老年人为研究对象,采用N-back认知任务探讨在不同难度的认知负荷任务中老年人消极元刻板印象激活的认知效应。结果发现：1、消极元刻板印象激活组的正确率显著低于未激活组;高认知负荷任务组的正确率显著低于低认知负荷任务组。2、消极元刻板印象激活组的反应时显著长于未激活组;高认知负荷任务组的反应时显著长于低认知负荷任务组;组别与任务难度之间交互作用达到边缘显著,在低认知负荷任务中,消极元刻板印象激活组和未激活组的反应时差异不显著,在高认知负荷任务中,消极元刻板印象激活组的反应时显著长于未激活组。上述结果表明,老年人消极元刻板印象的激活导致了负面的认知效应。     

The object advantage can be eliminated under equiluminant conditions

A key phenomenon supporting the existence of object-based attention is the object advantage, in which responses are faster for within-object, relative to equidistant between-object, shifts of attention. The origins of this effect have been variously ascribed to low-level “bottom-up” sensory processing and to a cognitive “top-down” strategy of within-object attention prioritization. The degree to which the object advantage depends on lower-level sensory processing was examined by differentially stimulating the magnocellular (M) and parvocellular (P) retino-geniculo-cortical visual pathways by using equiluminant and nonequiluminant conditions. We found that the object advantage can be eliminated when M activity is reduced using psychophysically equiluminant stimuli. This novel result in normal observers suggests that the origin of the object advantage is found in lower-level sensory processing rather than a general cognitive process, which should not be so sensitive to differential activation of the bottom-up P and M pathways. Eliminating the object advantage while maintaining a spatial-cueing advantage with reduced M activity suggests that the notion of independent M-driven spatial attention and P-driven object attention requires revision.     

Near‐ and Far‐Transfer Effects of Working Memory Updating Training in Elderly Adults

Age‐related declines in working memory, especially with regard to updating ability, affect many high‐level aspects of cognition in elderly adults. Recent studies have demonstrated that training might improve working memory. We investigated the effects of 20 days of adaptive training of working memory updating in healthy elderly adults. Comparing the performance on cognitive function tests before and after training in a trained group and a non‐trained group, significant positive training effects were observed in a numerical updating task and a digit‐span test, but not in a non‐verbal reasoning test. The results suggest beneficial effects of working memory updating training to working memory tasks that use different content material and task formats than those used during training. However, confirming the results of previous studies, transfer effects to other higher order cognitive processes seem to be absent in elderly adults. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Poor hand-pointing to sounds in right brain-damaged patients: Not just a problem of spatial-hearing

We asked 22 right brain-damaged (RBD) patients and 11 elderly healthy controls to perform hand-pointing movements to free-field unseen sounds, while modulating two non-auditory variables: the initial position of the responding hand (left, centre or right) and the presence or absence of task-irrelevant ambient vision. RBD patients suffering from visual neglect, unlike RBD patients without neglect and healthy controls, showed a systematic rightward error in sound localisation, which was modulated by the non-auditory variables. Localisation errors were exacerbated by initial hand-position to the right of the body-midline, and reduced by the leftwards initial hand-position. Moreover, for the visual neglect patients, mere presence of ambient vision worsened localisation errors. These results demonstrate that although hand-pointing to sounds has often been considered a straightforward approach to investigate sound-localisation abilities in brain-damaged patients, in some patients it may actually reveal localisation deficits that reflect a combination of impaired spatial-hearing and spatial biases from other sensory modalities (i.e., vision and proprioception).     

COGNITIVE APPRAISALS OF LIFE STRESS AND DEPRESSION IN THE ELDERLY: A CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARISON OF ASIANS AND CAUCASIANS

Cognitive models of depression have not been adequately tested in different cultural settings involving personally relevant events that affect the lives of the elderly. A cross-sectional comparison was made of cognitions obtained from Asian and Caucasian subjects, residing in Canada and the United States. The objective was to determine whether cognitive appraisals of stressful events would differentiate the elderly in the two cultural groups. Results supported the hypotheses that cognitive appraisals of locus of control, uncertainty, self-responsibility, self-confidence in future coping and fear about future recurrence of negative events are strongly associated with the depressive responses of the elderly in general. A comparison of the cognitive appraisals of the elderly in the two cultural groups showed depressed Asians more significantly than depressed Caucasians, reporting more external locus of control and self-blaming attributions. The results have implications for community workers, psychotherapists and social welfare agents concerned with the mental well-being of the elderly and the care of the elderly from different cultures.     

Asymmetry of visual interference

This research studies lateral interference among items in the visual field under conditions in which central cognitive factors such as attention and memory limitations are eliminated or controlled for. Under these conditions lateral masking is still found, and it is still asymmetrical (peripheral items interfere with recognition of central items more than central with peripheral). These experiments therefore add to the evidence that both lateral interference and the asymmetry of interference have a component that does not result from cognitive strategies. The experiments also add to the evidence that the asymmetry effect at the sensory level can be attributed to the falloff in acuity from the center to the periphery of the retina, since the mean eccentricity of the target-mask cluster is more peripheral with a peripheral mask than with a central mask. The hypothesis is advanced that the asymmetry effect, as well as lateral interference itself, at the sensory level results from the grouping of target and mask into a single Gestalt-like configuration. The final experiment in the series supports this hypothesis     

Poor hand-pointing to sounds in right brain-damaged patients: not just a problem of spatial-hearing

We asked 22 right brain-damaged (RBD) patients and 11 elderly healthy controls to perform hand-pointing movements to free-field unseen sounds, while modulating two non-auditory variables: the initial position of the responding hand (left, centre or right) and the presence or absence of task-irrelevant ambient vision. RBD patients suffering from visual neglect, unlike RBD patients without neglect and healthy controls, showed a systematic rightward error in sound localisation, which was modulated by the non-auditory variables. Localisation errors were exacerbated by initial hand-position to the right of the body-midline, and reduced by the leftwards initial hand-position. Moreover, for the visual neglect patients, mere presence of ambient vision worsened localisation errors. These results demonstrate that although hand-pointing to sounds has often been considered a straightforward approach to investigate sound-localisation abilities in brain-damaged patients, in some patients it may actually reveal localisation deficits that reflect a combination of impaired spatial-hearing and spatial biases from other sensory modalities (i.e., vision and proprioception).     

老年人认知功能的变化轨迹：基于潜变量增长模型的分析

摘 要 本研究采用中国老年健康影响因素跟踪调查（CLHLS）的4次数据（2002,2005,2008,2011）,对老年人认知功能的变化趋势以及影响因素进行了探讨。结果显示：（1）老年人认知功能在4次测查中呈非线性的下降趋势。（2）日常生活活动能力较低的个体其认知功能也较低;老年人读书年限越高,其认知功能水平越高;女性的认知功能水平低于男性;不饮酒的老年人认知功能低于饮酒的老年人。（3）读书年限与饮酒会正向预测模型的斜率。     

Genetic factors and neurocognitive traits

Genetic contributions to phenotypic variation in general intelligence have been studied extensively. Less research has been conducted on genetic contributions to specific cognitive abilities, such as attention, memory, working memory, language, and motor functions. However, the existing data indicate a significant role of genetic factors in these abilities. Stages of information processing, such as sensory gating, early sensory registration, and cognitive analysis, also show evidence of genetic contributions. Recent molecular studies have begun to identify candidate genes for specific cognitive functions. Future research, identifying endophenotypes based on cognitive profiles of neuropsychiatric disorders, may also assist in the detection of genes that increase susceptibility to major psychiatric disorders.     

老年人情绪注意积极效应的发生机制

20世纪, 许多心理学家从“厄运与苦难”视角研究人晚年遭遇的身体、认知和情绪衰老, 但是近年的理论与实证研究从“老化悖论”——老年人情绪加工的积极效应——视角挑战这一“定论”。积极效应指老年人认知加工过程中比年轻人更偏好正性而非负性材料的现象。第二代社会情绪选择理论包括积极效应理论、认知控制假说和强弱整合模型3个关于认知和情绪功能年龄差异的理论模型, 特别强调了认知控制在老年人积极情绪加工中的潜在作用, 而自动化加工与控制性加工的区分则取决于注意资源配置。因此, 认知控制在老年人对积极情绪的注意加工中起重要作用。此外, 注意偏向的时间进程也是影响老年人情绪注意中积极效应的关键因素。最后, 综合以往研究构建出认知控制对老年人积极效应发生作用的注意阶段模型。未来研究可从中国老年人情绪注意加工模式、不同认知控制子成分的作用机制、提高研究生态学效度和注意的治疗品质几个方面继续探索。     

休闲活动对我国老年人认知功能的影响

本文通过分析中国老年健康影响因素跟踪调查(CLHLS)2011年的数据,研究了参与休闲活动对老年人认知功能的影响。研究发现,参与各项休闲活动比例较高的老年人,其认知功能缺损的比例相对较低。回归分析结果表明,当控制了样本的人口特征(包括年龄、受教育程度、性别、居住地)、社会经济地位、健康状况、以及生活习惯等变量以后,参与社交类、益智类、以及轻度户外活动的程度越高,我国老年人认知功能缺损的可能性就越低。这些发现鼓励我国老年人在晚年积极参与上述几类休闲活动从而降低其认知功能衰退的风险。