Age-related differences and the role of augmented visual feedback in learning a bimanual coordination pattern

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of aging and the role of augmented visual information in the acquisition of a new bimanual coordination pattern, namely a 90° relative phase pattern. In a pilot study, younger and older adults received augmented visual feedback in the form of a real-time orthogonal display of both limb movements after every fifth trial. Younger adults acquired this task over three days of practice and retained the task well over periods of one week and one month of no practice while the older adults showed no improvement at all on the task. It was hypothesized that the amount of augmented information was not sufficient for the older adults to overcome the strong tendency to perform natural, intrinsically stable coordination patterns, which consequently prevented them from learning the task. The present study evaluated the age-related role of augmented visual feedback for learning the new pattern. Participants were randomly assigned within age groups to receive either concurrent or terminal visual feedback after every trial in acquisition. In contrast to the pilot study, all of the older adults learned the pattern, although not to the same level as the younger adults. Both younger and older adults benefitted from concurrent visual feedback, but the older adults gained more from the concurrent feedback than the younger adults, relative to terminal feedback conditions. The results suggest that when learning bimanual coordination patterns, older adults are more sensitive to the structure of the practice conditions, particularly the availability of concurrent visual information. This greater sensitivity to the learning environment may reflect a diminished capacity for inhibitory control and a decreased ability to focus attention on the salient aspects of learning the task.     

Compensatory processing during rule-based category learning in older adults

Healthy older adults typically perform worse than younger adults at rule-based category learning, but better than patients with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease. To further investigate aging’s effect on rule-based category learning, we monitored event-related potentials (ERPs) while younger and neuropsychologically typical older adults performed a visual category-learning task with a rule-based category structure and trial-by-trial feedback. Using these procedures, we previously identified ERPs sensitive to categorization strategy and accuracy in young participants. In addition, previous studies have demonstrated the importance of neural processing in the prefrontal cortex and the medial temporal lobe for this task. In this study, older adults showed lower accuracy and longer response times than younger adults, but there were two distinct subgroups of older adults. One subgroup showed near-chance performance throughout the procedure, never categorizing accurately. The other subgroup reached asymptotic accuracy that was equivalent to that in younger adults, although they categorized more slowly. These two subgroups were further distinguished via ERPs. Consistent with the compensation theory of cognitive aging, older adults who successfully learned showed larger frontal ERPs when compared with younger adults. Recruitment of prefrontal resources may have improved performance while slowing response times. Additionally, correlations of feedback-locked P300 amplitudes with category-learning accuracy differentiated successful younger and older adults. Overall, the results suggest that the ability to adapt one’s behavior in response to feedback during learning varies across older individuals, and that the failure of some to adapt their behavior may reflect inadequate engagement of prefrontal cortex.     

Induction of combination rules in two-dimensional function learning

Previous studies have typically found that when people learn to combine two dimensions of a stimulus to select a response, they learn additive combination rules more easily than nonadditive (e.g., multiplicative) ones. The present experiments demonstrate that in some situations people can learn multiplicative rules more easily than other (e.g., additive) rules. Subjects learned to produce specified response durations when presented with stimulus lines varying in length and angle of orientation. When stimuliand correct responses were related by a multiplicative combination of power functions, learning was relatively easy (Experiment 1). In contrast, systematic response biases occurred during the early phases of learning an additive combination of linear functions (Experiment 2) and a more complex (nonadditive and nonmultiplicative) combination of linear functions (Experiment3), suggesting that people have a tendency to induce a multiplicative combination of power functions. However, the initial biases decreased with practice. These results are explained in terms of a revised adaptive regression model of function learning originally proposed by Koh and Meyer (1991). Differences between the present results and previous results in the literature are discussed.     

Age differences in memory for names: the effect of prelearned semantic associations

Previous research has shown that people-especially older adults-have a special difficulty in learning the names of newly encountered people. This is potentially attributable to the lack of direct link in memory between a face and name. The present experiments investigated whether older and younger adults could use other semantic information about a person (i.e., a "mediator") to indirectly link a name to a face. In each of two experiments, older and younger adults prelearned associations between semantic information (character information or occupations) and names. They then attempted to learn links between faces and either the names or semantic information. In the "unmediated" condition, participants learned only one piece of information (either the name or the semantic information) about each face, whereas in the "mediated" condition, they learned both the to-be-tested information as well as the "mediator" (i.e., both the name and the other semantic information). Experiment 1 showed that, at a simple level, both age groups could use character information ("good" or "bad") to help recognize people's names, given their faces. Experiment 2 showed that knowing the occupation associated with a name helped both age groups to later recall the name associated with a given face.     

Iconicity in the speech of children and adults

Iconicity – the correspondence between form and meaning – may help young children learn to use new words. Early‐learned words are higher in iconicity than later learned words. However, it remains unclear what role iconicity may play in actual language use. Here, we ask whether iconicity relates not just to the age at which words are acquired, but also to how frequently children and adults use the words in their speech. If iconicity serves to bootstrap word learning, then we would expect that children should say highly iconic words more frequently than less iconic words, especially early in development. We would also expect adults to use iconic words more often when speaking to children than to other adults. We examined the relationship between frequency and iconicity for approximately 2000 English words. Replicating previous findings, we found that more iconic words are learned earlier. Moreover, we found that more iconic words tend to be used more by younger children, and adults use more iconic words when speaking to children than to other adults. Together, our results show that young children not only learn words rated high in iconicity earlier than words low in iconicity, but they also produce these words more frequently in conversation – a pattern that is reciprocated by adults when speaking with children. Thus, the earliest conversations of children are relatively higher in iconicity, suggesting that this iconicity scaffolds the production and comprehension of spoken language during early development.     

The influence of semantic relationships on older adult map memory

Research has shown that nonspatial features, including semantic categories, can bias younger adults' spatial location memory. For example, semantically related information is remembered as being closer in space than semantically unrelated information (Hirtle & Mascolo, 1986). These findings suggest that verbal information is concurrently encoded with spatial information and influences younger adults' spatial information retrieval. The present study explored whether older adults have a similar dependency between verbal and spatial information. In Experiment 1, older and younger adults learned maps depicting semantically categorizable landmarks. After learning, participants completed landmark free recall and distance estimation tasks. Younger adults recalled more landmarks from semantically organized maps compared with older adults. In addition, younger adults were more likely to underestimate the distance between semantically related landmarks than were older adults. Experiment 2 examined whether supportive instructions would influence older adults' use of verbal information when learning maps. When given instructions that encouraged semantic feature use, older adults remembered more landmarks, were more likely to cluster landmarks semantically, and demonstrated biases in distance estimation based on semantic relationships. These findings suggest that verbal influences on spatial/map learning in older adults depends on explicit instructions or environmental support at encoding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Aging affects motor learning but not savings at transfer of learning

Two important components of skill learning are the learning process itself (motor acquisition) and the ability to transfer what has been learned to new task variants (motor transfer). Many studies have documented age-related declines in the ability to learn new manual motor skills. In this study, I tested whether the degree of savings at transfer of learning is similarly affected by advancing age. Young and older adults made aiming movements with a joystick to hit targets presented on a computer screen, with real-time feedback display of their movement. They adapted to three different rotations of the feedback display in a sequential fashion, with return to the normal feedback display between each. Adaptation performance was better when it was preceded by other adaptive experiences, regardless of age.     

A quantitative model-based approach to examining aging effects on information-integration category learning

Information-integration category learning was examined in older and younger adults. Accuracy results indicated that older participants learned less well than younger participants in both linear and nonlinear conditions. Model-based analyses indicated that both groups in the linear condition tended to use information integration but that later in training younger participants were more likely to do so. In contrast, the 2 groups in the nonlinear condition were equally likely to use information integration. Further analysis indicated that younger adults were more accurate than older adults when an information-integration approach was adopted, whereas fewer age-related differences were observed when a rule-based approach was used, suggesting that age can have a negative impact on information-integration category learning processes but less impact on rule-based learning.     

The effects of emotion on younger and older adults’ monitoring of learning

Age-related differences in memory monitoring appear when people learn emotional words. Namely, younger adults’ judgments of learning (JOLs) are higher for positive than neutral words, whereas older adults’ JOLs do not discriminate between positive versus neutral words. In two experiments, we evaluated whether this age-related difference extends to learning positive versus neutral pictures. We also evaluated the contribution of two dimensions of emotion that may impact younger and older adults’ JOLs: valence and arousal. Younger and older adults studied pictures that were positive or neutral and either high or low in arousal. Participants made immediate JOLs and completed memory tests. In both experiments, the magnitude of older adults’ JOLs was influenced by emotion, and both younger and older adults demonstrated an emotional salience effect on JOLs. As important, the magnitude of participants’ JOLs was influenced by valence, and not arousal. Emotional salience effects were also evident on participants’ free recall, and older adults recalled as many pictures as did younger adults. Taken together, these data suggest that older adults do not have a monitoring deficit when learning positive (vs. neutral) pictures and that emotional salience effects on younger and older adults’ JOLs are produced more by valence than by arousal.     

Decision-making and feedback sensitivity: A comparison between older and younger adults

This study investigated decision-making and feedback sensitivity in healthy older adults with a new task: the Pictures Decision Task. The study was conducted on 27 older (aged 64–88) and 26 younger adults (aged 25–57) matched for years of education. Results showed that older adults did not show the Jumping to Conclusions bias and that older adults had difficulty learning from feedback only when the context was ambiguous and not when they were given aids or interpretative information that decreased ambiguity. The Pictures Decision Task, with respect to the Iowa Gambling Task and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, allowed us to assess decision-making and feedback sensitivity under highly ambiguous conditions and therefore to add new insight into the reasoning process of older people.     

Role of age in relation between two kinds of abilities and performance in acquisition of new motor skill

Better understanding of age-related differences in skilled performance was the focus of analyses of cognitive-performance scores-relationships in acquisition of a new motor skill. 31 younger adults and 33 older adults were tested on both a cognitive and a psychomotor test. Then, they were asked to learn a juggling task over 12 sessions of 20 min. Analysis indicated age-related differences in the rate of learning. Acquisition by the younger adult group was significantly faster than that by the older adult group. This difference was also reflected in the relationship of cognition and performance for the two age groups. Motor execution for the older adults seemed to require more psychomotor ability, especially at the end of the learning sessions, and was dependent on cognitive control. This trend is consistent with the perspective that cognitive predictors of performance are related to age.     

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.     

记忆的前向测试效应对老年人学习新事物的作用

为检验前置测试是否可以有效地提升老年人学习新事物的能力,参与实验的老年人被随机分为有前置测试的实验组和无前置测试的对照组,在实验1中学习了5列单词,在实验2中记忆了5列日用品,在实验3中学习了4段讲座视频。结果表明,实验组老年人对新事物的记忆成绩均高于对照组的老年人。结论认为,前置测试能够显著提升老年人学习新事物的能力,干扰降低与学习参与相结合的“加减”理论能更好地解释提升老年人记忆的前向测试效应。     

Are there age-related differences in learning to optimize speed, accuracy, and energy expenditure?

Studies of age-related differences in manual aiming have indicated that older adults take longer to complete their movements than their younger counterparts because they tend to rely on time-consuming feedback-based control processes. Many authors have suggested that the reliance on feedback is the result of a "play-it-safe" strategy that has been adopted to compensate for a deterioration in accurate and consistent force generation. That is, perhaps because older adults know that their motor systems are not as reliable as the systems were at a younger age, they plan shorter movements that conserve time and space for feedback control to correct their programmed actions. The vast majority of the previous studies that have revealed these age-related differences in aiming, however, have used computer-based tasks that involve the transformation of perceptual into motor space. In the present experiment, older and younger adults completed real aiming movements over three sessions. The results suggest that, when acting in a real environment, the main difference between older and younger adults in movement execution lies in the efficient use of response-related feedback, not in the programming of movement.     

The effectiveness of updating metacognitive knowledge in the elderly: evidence from metamnemonic judgments of word frequency

Accurate metacognitive knowledge is vital for optimal performance in self-regulated learning. Yet older adults have deficiencies in implementing effective learning strategies and knowledge updating and consequently may not learn as effectively from task experience as younger adults. Here we assess the ability of older adults to update metacognitive knowledge about the effects of word frequency on recognition. Young adults have been shown to correct their misconceptions through experience with the task, but the greater difficulty older adults have with knowledge updating makes it unclear whether task experience will be sufficient for older adults. The performance of older adults in this experiment qualitatively replicates the results of a comparison group of younger subjects, indicating that both groups are able to correct their metacognitive knowledge through task experience. Older adults seem to possess more effective and flexible metacognition than sometimes suggested.     

Age-related differences in effectiveness of item restudy choices: the role of value

We examined the effect of value on effectiveness of restudy choices in younger and older adults by using an honor or dishonor procedure. In the honor condition, participants restudied the half of the items that they selected for restudy. In the dishonor condition, participants restudied the half of the items that they did not select for restudy. The results showed that younger adults restudied more low-value (1-point) items that they had rated as least-well learned, while older adults restudied more high-value (5-point) items. For younger adults, 1-point-value item performance in the honor condition was reliably higher than it was in the dishonor condition. For older adults, 5-point-value items performance in the honor condition was reliably higher than it was in the dishonor condition. These results suggest that older adults can exert effective restudy choices like younger adults when item value is manipulated.     

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.     

Word-list-learning performance in younger and older adults: intra-individual performance variability and false memory

We investigated the word-list-learning performance of younger and older adults over 4 consecutive days at different times of day to study age-related differences in consistency of performance over time and the influence of circadian variation on performance. Eighteen younger (M age, 23.4 years) and 18 older (M age, 73.3 years) men and women participated. The start time of testing alternated between morning and early evening across the 4 days of testing. On each test day, participants learned a different list of 15 unrelated words over four learning trials. As expected, younger adults performed better than older adults on immediate recall, delayed recall, and recognition. Contrary to our expectations, time of day did not significantly influence recall or recognition performance in either the older or younger adults. Older adults did show a greater incidence of false memory (i.e., previously learned list intrusions in free recall and false alarms in recognition) than younger adults. Older adults also exhibited greater intra-individual performance variability on the measures of false memory across test days. This variability was not related to circadian variation. False memory and variability of performance have both been linked to frontal systems dysfunction. The findings presented here are consistent with the notion that changes in cognition with aging in part reflect age-related decline in frontal lobe function.     

The impact of motor responses on serial-pattern learning

Subjects are able to learn even very complex serial patterns in serial-reaction-time tasks. The investigation of the learning processes behind this phenomenon has yielded contradictory results. Some studies have come to the conclusion the subjects had learned the sequence of stimuli. Other studies have assumed that the sequence of responses had been learned or a combination of both stimuli and responses. The present experiments stress the impact of motor responses on serial-pattern learning. The subjects had to respond to serial targets that were presented within a matrix of distractors. The position of each target could be predicted from the identity and position of the previous target. If the subjects were to learn this pattern, they would be able to speed up the search for the target and give faster responses. The results indicated that the relation between the target identity and the position of the next target was acquired much better by those subjects who had to respond to each target with a special motor response. If the same response was required for the relevant targets, knowledge of the rule was somewhat fragmentary. To explain these results, mechanisms of motor learning and motor planning are discussed. It is assumed that learning of the rules occurs if the position changes appear to be effects of different motor responses.