The effects of healthy aging on the mnemonic benefit of survival processing

A number of studies have shown that information is remembered better when it is processed for its survival relevance than when it is processed for relevance to other, non-survival-related contexts. Here we conducted three experiments to investigate whether the survival advantage also occurs for healthy older adults. In Experiment 1, older and younger adults rated words for their relevance to a grassland survival or moving scenario and then completed an unexpected free recall test on the words. We replicated the survival advantage in two separate groups of younger adults, one of which was placed under divided-attention conditions, but we did not find a survival advantage in the older adults. We then tested two additional samples of older adults using a between- (Exp. 2) or within- (Exp. 3) subjects design, but still found no evidence of the survival advantage in this age group. These results suggest that, although survival processing is an effective encoding strategy for younger adults, it does not provide the same mnemonic benefit to healthy elders.     

Spatial and temporal processing in healthy aging: implications for perceptions of driving skills

Sensitivity to the attributes of a stimulus (form or motion) and accuracy when detecting rapidly presented stimulus information were measured in older (N = 36) and younger (N = 37) groups. Before and after practice, the older group was significantly less sensitive to global motion (but not to form) and less accurate on a rapid sequencing task when detecting the individual elements presented in long but not short sequences. These effect sizes produced power for the different analyses that ranged between 0.5 and 1.00. The reduced sensitivity found among older individuals to temporal but not spatial stimuli, adds support to previous findings of a selective age-related deficit in temporal processing. Older women were significantly less sensitive than older men, younger men and younger women on the global motion task. Gender effects were evident when, in response to global motion stimuli, complex extraction and integration processes needed to be undertaken rapidly. Significant moderate correlations were found between age, global motion sensitivity and reports of perceptions of other vehicles and road signs when driving. These associations suggest that reduced motion sensitivity may produce functional difficulties for the older adults when judging speeds or estimating gaps in traffic while driving.     

Context processing and context maintenance in healthy aging and early stage dementia of the Alzheimer's type

Declines in the ability to process context information may represent a fundamental mechanism of age-related cognitive changes. Two components of context processing--activation/updating and maintenance--were examined in a sample of healthy younger and older adults, along with individuals suffering from early stage dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT). All older adult groups showed context activation/updating impairments, whereas context maintenance was only impaired in the oldest adults (age>75 years) and was further exacerbated in DAT individuals. The results suggest that context processing may be composed of functionally dissociable components and point to the utility of this construct in understanding the timecourse of cognitive decline in healthy and pathological aging.     

Context processing in older adults: evidence for a theory relating cognitive control to neurobiology in healthy aging.

A theory of cognitive aging is presented in which healthy older adults are hypothesized to suffer from disturbances in the processing of context that impair cognitive control function across multiple domains, including attention, inhibition, and working memory. These cognitive disturbances are postulated to be directly related to age-related decline in the function of the dopamine (DA) system in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). A connectionist computational model is described that implements specific mechanisms for the role of DA and PFC in context processing. The behavioral predictions of the model were tested in a large sample of older (N = 81) and young (N = 175) adults performing variants of a simple cognitive control task that placed differential demands on context processing. Older adults exhibited both performance decrements and, counterintuitively, performance improvements that are in close agreement with model predictions.     

Impaired acquisition of goal-directed action in healthy aging

According to dual-system theories, instrumental learning is supported by dissociable goal-directed and habitual systems. Previous investigations of the dual-system balance in healthy aging have yielded mixed results. To further investigate this issue, we compared performance of young (17–24 years) and older (69–84 years) adults on an instrumental learning task. Following the initial learning phase, the behavioral autonomy of the motivational significance of the instrumental outcome was assessed with an outcome-devaluation test and slips-of-action test. The present study provides evidence for a disrupted dual-system balance in healthy aging, as reflected in reduced outcome-induced conflict during acquisition, as well as in impaired performance during the test stage, during which participants had to flexibly adjust their actions to changes in the current desirability of the behavioral outcome. These findings will be discussed in relation to previous aging studies into habitual and goal-directed control, as well as other cognitive impairments, challenges that older adults may face in everyday life, and to the neurobiological basis of the developmental pattern of goal-directed action across the lifespan.     

Positivity effect in healthy aging in observational but not active feedback-learning

The present study investigated the impact of healthy aging on the bias to learn from positive or negative performance feedback in observational and active feedback learning. In active learning, a previous study had already shown a negative learning bias in healthy seniors older than 75 years, while no bias was found for younger seniors. However, healthy aging is accompanied by a 'positivity effect', a tendency to primarily attend to stimuli with positive valence. Based on recent findings of dissociable neural mechanisms in active and observational feedback learning, the positivity effect was hypothesized to influence older participants' observational feedback learning in particular. In two separate experiments, groups of young (mean age 27) and older participants (mean age 60 years) completed an observational or active learning task designed to differentially assess positive and negative learning. Older but not younger observational learners showed a significant bias to learn better from positive than negative feedback. In accordance with previous findings, no bias was found for active learning. This pattern of results is discussed in terms of differences in the neural underpinnings of active and observational learning from performance feedback.     

Positivity effect in healthy aging in observational but not active feedback-learning

ABSTRACT

The present study investigated the impact of healthy aging on the bias to learn from positive or negative performance feedback in observational and active feedback learning. In active learning, a previous study had already shown a negative learning bias in healthy seniors older than 75 years, while no bias was found for younger seniors. However, healthy aging is accompanied by a ‘positivity effect’, a tendency to primarily attend to stimuli with positive valence. Based on recent findings of dissociable neural mechanisms in active and observational feedback learning, the positivity effect was hypothesized to influence older participants' observational feedback learning in particular. In two separate experiments, groups of young (mean age 27) and older participants (mean age 60 years) completed an observational or active learning task designed to differentially assess positive and negative learning. Older but not younger observational learners showed a significant bias to learn better from positive than negative feedback. In accordance with previous findings, no bias was found for active learning. This pattern of results is discussed in terms of differences in the neural underpinnings of active and observational learning from performance feedback.     

Binocular rivalry: a window into emotional processing in aging

Previous binocular rivalry studies with younger adults have shown that emotional stimuli dominate perception over neutral stimuli. Here we investigated the effects of age on patterns of emotional dominance during binocular rivalry. Participants performed a face/house rivalry task where the emotion of the face (happy, angry, neutral) and orientation (upright, inverted) of the face and house stimuli were varied systematically. Age differences were found with younger adults showing a general emotionality effect (happy and angry faces were more dominant than neutral faces) and older adults showing inhibition of anger (neutral faces were more dominant than angry faces) and positivity effects (happy faces were more dominant than both angry and neutral faces). Age differences in dominance patterns were reflected by slower rivalry rates for both happy and angry compared to neutral face/house pairs in younger adults, and slower rivalry rates for happy compared to both angry and neutral face/house pairs in older adults. Importantly, these patterns of emotional dominance and slower rivalry rates for emotional-face/house pairs disappeared when the stimuli were inverted. This suggests that emotional valence, and not low-level image features, were responsible for the emotional bias in both age groups. Given that binocular rivalry has a limited role for voluntary control, the findings imply that anger suppression and positivity effects in older adults may extend to more automatic tasks.     

Recall and recognition measures of paired associate learning in healthy aging

Associate-recognition has received little attention as a potential clinical tool for detecting early Alzheimer's disease (AD). As an important preliminary stage to investigating the paradigm's diagnostic utility, we designed and administered a verbal associate-recognition task to healthy elderly participants (n = 62) and compared their performance to that on traditional cued-recall PAL. In both test conditions, the stimulus list comprised of a mixture of highly imageable and less imageable word pairs. Overall, performance on the associate-recognition task was superior to that on the cued-recall analogue. This 'recognition advantage' was not attributable to the higher baseline or chance guessing rate in the associate-recognition condition, as the size of the recognition advantage varied across learning trials and stimulus imageability. In comparison to performance on the imageable stimuli, performance on the less imageable stimuli was poor in both associate-recognition and cued-recall conditions. Across the delay, performances were more likely to drop in the cued-recall condition than the associate-recognition condition. These results suggest that verbal associate-recognition may be clinically efficacious and better tolerated in elderly populations than traditional cued-recall paradigms. Although these results are encouraging, further research is required to examine the utility of associate-recognition in clinical populations, particularly early AD.     

Spatial distribution of attentional inhibition is not altered in healthy aging

Inhibition of return (IOR) is a phenomenon of attentional orienting that is indexed by slower responses to targets presented at previously attended locations. The purpose of this study was to examine adult age differences in the distribution of IOR to multiple locations. In three experiments, young adults (ages 18–30 years) and older adults (ages 60–87 years) completed an IOR task that varied in the number of simultaneous onset cues (one to seven) and the number of display locations (four or eight). Analyses were conducted to explore whether IOR patterns were most consistent with limited inhibitory resources, with regional distribution of inhibition, or with vector averaging of cues. The IOR effects were most consistent with vector averaging, such that multiple cues initiated a directional gradient of inhibition centered on the average direction of the cues. The IOR patterns varied minimally with age, consistent with the conclusion that older adults and young adults distributed inhibition in a similar manner.     

语言认知老化机制及其神经基础

老龄化个体出现的认知障碍在某种程度上是由于语言的认知老化所导致,因此,了解语言认知老化的具体表现、老化机制及其神经基础对于延缓语言认知老化、矫正老年痴呆有重要意义。首先基于理解和产生两个维度,分别从词汇、句子和文本三个层面分析了语言认知老化的表现,而后着重从工作记忆的角度分析了语言认知老化的认知机制,在此基础上,进一步从词汇加工、语义提取、句法分析三个方面分析了语言认知老化的神经基础,并指出半球不对称性减弱和脑区的弥散性激活是语言认知老化的主要神经表现。最后,围绕着语言认知老化的"发展进程、领域表现形式、干预矫正方法"三个必须解决的问题展开讨论,为该领域未来的发展做出理论上的铺垫。     

Clinical tests of memory in dementia, depression, and healthy aging

In Study 1, carefully screened elderly adults with primary degenerative dementia or major depression were compared to healthy aged control subjects on three tests of learning and memory: the Benton Visual Retention Test, Inglis Paired-Associate Learning Test, and the Fuld Object-Memory Evaluation (OME). The sharpest distinction in performance among the groups was observed on the OME, and discriminant equations based on this test correctly classified a high percentage (greater than or equal to 90%) of participants. Study 2 applied the classification rules derived in the first investigation to an unselected series of geropsychiatry inpatients referred for neuropsychological evaluation. There was agreement between memory test classification and general categories of clinical discharge diagnosis (organic vs. functional) for 21 of 25 patients, and with status at follow-up approximately 18 months later. Predictive value computations suggested that the OME is more accurate in confirming true dementia than in detecting dementia syndromes associated with functional disorders.     

Mild memory impairment in healthy older adults is distinct from normal aging

Mild memory impairment was detected in 28% of a sample of healthy community-dwelling older adults using the delayed recall trial of a word list learning task. Statistical analysis revealed that individuals with memory impairment also demonstrated relative deficits on other measures of memory, and tests of executive function, processing speed and global cognition, as measured by the CERAD and CogState batteries and CANTAB paired associate learning task. These relative deficits cannot be explained by age-related changes, education, intelligence, mood, health-related factors, or the individuals' ApoEepsilon4 status. Memory-impaired individuals (n = 30) did not recognize the extent of their memory and cognitive difficulties beyond the general complaints expressed by normal elderly (n = 77) within the study and their apparent difficulties did not appear to impact on their participation in life activities. These findings suggest it is unlikely that the memory and cognitive difficulties demonstrated by individuals with mild memory impairment reflect normal aging. Rather it is possible that such impairment may signal early neurodegenerative processes worthy of further investigation.     

Striatal activity in concept learning

Striatal learning systems have been implicated in learning relationships between visual stimuli and outcomes. In the present study, the activity of the striatum during visual concept learning in humans was examined by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants performed three concept-learning tasks and a baseline task. The participants were trained to criterion before fMRI scanning on two tasks, verbal and implicit. In the verbal task, classification could be performed on the basis of a simple verbal rule, but in the implicit task, there was no simple verbal rule. The novel-implicit learning task, in which an implicit structure was used, was not encountered by the participants before scanning. Across all three concept-learning tasks, there was significant activation in the striatum, in comparison with the baseline task. The striatum was recruited similarly in classification when the participants had different levels of expertise (novel-implicit vs. verbal and implicit) and were able to verbalize their learning to different degrees (verbal vs. implicit and novel-implicit). There was left lateral occipital activation when learning was implicit (implicit and novel-implicit), but not when learning was easily verbalized (verbal).     

Individual differences in spatial pattern separation performance associated with healthy aging in humans

Rodent studies have suggested that “pattern separation,” the ability to distinguish among similar experiences, is diminished in a subset of aged rats. We extended these findings to the human using a task designed to assess spatial pattern separation behavior (determining at time of test whether pairs of pictures shown during the study were in the same spatial locations). Using a standardized test of word recall to divide healthy aged adults into impaired and unimpaired groups relative to young performance, we demonstrate that aged impaired adults are biased away from pattern separation and toward pattern completion, consistent with the rodent studies.Memory impairment is a common complaint among aging individuals, yet the variability within the aging population is great in both rats (Gallagher et al. 2006; Robitsek et al. 2008) and humans (Hilborn et al. 2009). A rodent model of aging (Gallagher et al. 2006; Wilson et al. 2006) has demonstrated that ∼50% of healthy rats qualify as cognitively “impaired” by scoring outside the range of the young performance in a standard protocol (Gallagher et al. 1993). The other half, the “unimpaired” rats, perform on par with young adults, demonstrating a natural degree of variability in cognitive aging. In this study, we sought to capitalize on the variability observed in the aging of both rats and humans in a study of spatial pattern separation.One source of variability in memory performance is hypothesized to be tied to changes in the input to the dentate gyrus (DG), which has been shown in the rat to be affected by the aging process. Smith et al. (2000) reported a selective impairment in layer II entorhinal input into the DG and CA3 regions of the hippocampus in rats with cognitive impairment. Similarly, the number of synapses in the outer receiving layer of DG was reduced in autopsied aged brains and correlated with earlier performance on a delayed recall task (Scheff et al. 2006). Finally, in a human imaging study, Small et al. (2002) observed that 60% of their aging sample demonstrated diminished MRI signal in the hippocampal region (including the DG) and also had a greater decline in memory performance. These findings support the notion that changes in the DG associated with aging may affect memory performance.The DG may be particularly important for the computations that underlie pattern separation (Treves and Rolls 1994; McClelland et al. 1995; Norman and O''Reilly 2003). “Pattern separation” refers to the process by which similar inputs are stored as distinct, nonoverlapping representations. In contrast, “pattern completion” refers to the process by which an existing representation can be reinstated by the presentation of a partial or degraded cue. Numerous studies in the rodent have identified the importance of the DG for pattern separation using electrophysiological methods (Leutgeb et al. 2004, 2005, 2007; Leutgeb and Leutgeb 2007), immediate early gene expression (Vazdarjanova and Guzowski 2004), lesions (Lee et al. 2005; Gilbert and Kesner 2006; Goodrich-Hunsaker et al. 2008), and even genetic manipulations (Cravens et al. 2006; Kubik et al. 2007; McHugh et al. 2008). Human neuroimaging has also recently identified activity in the DG (and CA3 regions of the hippocampus) in an object pattern separation task (Kirwan and Stark 2007; Bakker et al. 2008).Given the importance of the DG in pattern separation and its vulnerability to changes that occur with aging, studies have begun to examine pattern separation in older adults. Our laboratory has designed a task to examine object-based pattern separation performance in humans (Kirwan and Stark 2007). In this task, pictures of objects were presented either once or repeatedly throughout the task. Critically, some of the items presented were lures that were similar but not identical to previously shown items. The overlapping features of the lures more heavily engaged pattern separation processes. In young adults, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activity in the DG was sensitive to the lures, indicating a role in pattern separation processes in both an explicit (Kirwan and Stark 2007) and implicit (Bakker et al. 2008) version of this task. Toner et al. (2009) used the explicit version of this task to demonstrate that older adults showed a greater tendency to identify lures as “old” (repeated) relative to young adults. These findings were also recently replicated in our laboratory (Yassa et al., in press), with the additional demonstration that older adults exhibit greater fMRI CA3/DG activity for the lures during both encoding and retrieval.Since object-based pattern separation appears to be modulated by the DG in humans, we wondered if these findings could be extended to spatial pattern separation. Rodent studies have demonstrated that the DG has a particular role in spatial pattern separation (Gilbert et al. 2001; Kesner et al. 2004). Specifically, Hunsaker et al. (2008) placed rats with localized DG lesions in an environment with two objects spaced 60 cm apart. When the animals were later placed in the same environment with the same objects now placed 40 cm apart, DG-lesioned animals (unlike control animals) did not re-explore the objects or environment. These data suggest that the DG-lesioned rats were not able to discriminate between the training and test environments. That is, they were impaired in spatial pattern separation. Since converging evidence suggests that one feature of the aging process can be characterized as a DG knockdown, we modified this task design for humans to test spatial pattern separation performance in older adults. While the Hunsaker et al. (2008) task emphasized the distance between the two objects as the source of interference creating a greater need for pattern separation, the paradigm presented here moves an object in any direction, changing both the distance and the angle (i.e., changing more of the spatial relations). We posit that this amount of movement (close, medium, or far) may place similar demands on spatial pattern separation processes as in the rodent task.The present study included 20 young adults (mean age 19.9 yr, range 18–27 yr) and 30 aged adults (mean age 70.4 yr, range 59–80 yr). Aged adults completed a battery of standardized neuropsychological tests, including the Mini-Mental State Exam (Folstein et al. 1975), Rey Auditory–Verbal Learning Task (RAVLT) (Rey 1941), Digit Span, Vocabulary, and Matrices subtests from the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale III (Wechsler 1997). The Vocabulary and Matrices scores were entered into a weighted formula along with age, gender, and education to derive estimated IQ scores (Schoenberg et al. 2003). All aged participants scored within the normal age-adjusted ranges on these measures and were cognitively intact. Younger adults also completed the RAVLT and scored within the normal age-adjusted range. These data are presented in Table 

Craving healthy foods?! How sensory appeals increase appetitive motivational processing of healthy foods in adolescents

ABSTRACT

The study examined how sensory appeal characteristics promoting fruits and vegetables capture attention, emotion, and memory formation, indicative of approach motivational processing. Grounded in biopsychological and communication science frameworks such as evolutionary theories, information-processing, LC4MP, and the dimensional emotion theory, two within-subjects experiments investigated how adolescents process pronutritional images appealing to the senses. Study 1 (N = 58, aged 12–18, 54% female) examined how sensory cues broke through the clutter of promotional media, attracting attentional selection, arousal and affect. Study 2 (N = 165, aged 12–18, 53% female) explored whether sensory appeal characteristics further directed the attention and mental resources toward processing the core healthy foods of fruits and vegetables. Eye-tracking provided an assessment of visual attentional focus and recognition memory indicated encoding efficiency. As hypothesized, core nutritious foods became noticeable, highly arousing, and memorable stimuli with adaptive significance to the organism when portrayed as enjoyable and ripe, through hedonic and palatability appeals. Sensory cues increased adolescents’ attentional selection and positive emotions to the pronutritional images, but also attracted visual focus and high memory formation of the fruits and vegetables. Health communication practice should take advantage of these results and promote core healthy foods through hedonic and visual food palatability appeals.     

Age changes in processing speed as a leading indicator of cognitive aging

Bivariate dual change score models were applied to longitudinal data from the Swedish Adoption/Twin Study of Aging to compare the dynamic predictions of 2-component theories of intelligence and the processing speed theory of cognitive aging. Data from up to 5 measurement occasions covering a 16-year period were available from 806 participants ranging in age from 50 to 88 years at the first measurement wave. Factors were generated to tap 4 general cognitive domains: verbal ability, spatial ability, memory, and processing speed. Model fitting indicated no dynamic relationship between verbal and spatial factors, providing no support for the hypothesis that age changes in fluid abilities drive age changes in crystallized abilities. The results suggest that, as predicted by the processing speed theory of cognitive aging, processing speed is a leading indicator of age changes in memory and spatial ability, but not verbal ability.     

语言能力的老化机制：语言特异性与非特异性因素的共同作用

语言能力的衰退是由于一般认知能力衰退引起的,还是由于语言加工系统的衰退引起的,抑或是两者的共同作用?研究中测量了青年组和老年组的一般认知能力(加工速度、工作记忆和抑制能力),以及在词汇、句子和语篇三个水平上的语言理解能力和语言产生能力。结果发现,一般认知能力、语言理解和语言产生能力都存在年老化现象。分层回归分析表明,一般认知能力对语言能力的贡献,以及语言理解能力和产生能力之间的相互贡献在青年组和老年组中是不同的,且存在词汇、句子和语篇水平上的差异。在词汇水平上,青年人的成绩能够被一般认知能力和另一种语言能力所显著预测,而老年人的成绩却不受一般认知因素影响;在句子水平上,青年人的成绩仍能被一般认知能力或另一种语言能力所解释,但这两类变量都无法预测老年人的任务成绩;在语篇水平上,青年人理解任务的成绩显著地受到产生能力影响,而老年人的理解和产生任务成绩则分别可以被一般认知能力和语言理解能力所解释。对组间差异的回归分析表明,一般认知能力和另一种语言能力对组间差异都有显著贡献,且前者的贡献大于后者。上述研究结果表明,语言能力的老化是语言特异性因素和非特异性因素共同作用的结果。