Executive function during and after acute moderate aerobic exercise in adolescents

ObjectivesIn two experiments, we investigated the effects of acute moderate-intensity exercise on aspects of executive function in adolescents.DesignAn experimental design was used.MethodsFifty-five Japanese adolescents (Experiment 1: N = 28; Experiment 2: N = 27) performed a modified flanker task and a modified n-back task to assess inhibitory control and working memory before, during, and after walking on a treadmill at moderate intensity (Experiment 1: 60% maximal heart rate; Experiment 2: 70% maximal heart rate). In a separate session, the same testing sequence was administered while participants sat in a chair.ResultThe results revealed that reaction time for working memory increased during exercise in both experiments, while response accuracy decreased during exercise only at 70% maximal heart rate. Moderate intensity exercise had no substantial effect on inhibition control. Following cessation of the exercise, no effects were observed for either executive function assessment.ConclusionThese results indicate that moderate intensity exercise selectively affects executive function in adolescents. Further, during physical activity, adolescents maintain inhibitory control, but their working memory declines. Further research is required to reveal the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon and to expand beyond the laboratory setting to the areas of sports and physical activities of daily living.     

Subjective memory loss in age-associated memory impairment: Family history and neuropsychological correlates

Abstract

Empiricist and rationalist approaches to data-quality control in meta-analyses are discussed, and a compromise approach advocated by Strube and Hartmann (1983) for theoretically driven meta-analyses is applied to Laver and Burke's (1993) data sets. When older adults' response times (RTs) and semantic priming effects (SPEs) are regressed on young adults' RTs and SPEs, the slopes of the regression lines are approximately 1.5 as long as the age difference is held constant and performance is reasonably accurate. Both increases and decreases in RTs following unrelated and related primes, relative to RTs following baseline primes, were analyzed. The results, like those regarding RTs and SPEs, support the hypothesis that, compared with young adults who are 50 years younger, older adults take approximately 50% longer to process lexical information     

A facilitative effect of negative affective valence on working memory

Gotoh, F., Kikuchi, T. &Olofsson, U. (2010). A facilitative effect of negative affective valence on working memory. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 51, 185–191. Previous studies have shown that negatively valenced information impaired working memory performance due to an attention‐capturing effect. The present study examined whether negative valence could also facilitate working memory. Affective words (negative, neutral, positive) were used as retro‐cues in a working memory task that required participants to remember colors at different spatial locations on a computer screen. Following the cue, a target detection task was used to either shift attention to a different location or keep attention at the same location as the retro‐cue. Finally, participants were required to discriminate the cued color from a set of distractors. It was found that negative cues yielded shorter response times (RTs) in the attention‐shift condition and longer RTs in the attention‐stay condition, compared with neutral and positive cues. The results suggest that negative affective valence may enhance working memory performance (RTs), provided that attention can be disengaged.     

Examining Visual-Verbal Associations in Children with and Without Reading Disorder

The purpose of this study was to investigate verbal working memory processing both before and after providing semantically elaborated training sentences designed to enhance memory for symbol-word (visual-verbal) pairs. Abilities of 20 children diagnosed with Reading Disorder (RD) and 20 age-matched peers who were normally achieving in reading (NA) were compared (M = 10 years old). Results demonstrated RD children experienced significantly more difficulties on measures of complex auditory-verbal working memory than their NA peers. The best predictor of reading performance was word recall ability measured after students were provided with semantic training sentences. Findings have important implications for identifying young children with potential reading impairment.     

Relationships between working memory and intelligence from a developmental perspective: Convergent evidence from a neo-Piagetian and a psychometric approach

The objective of this paper, in line with the other papers of this special issue, is to show the potentialities of combining intelligence research and cognitive psychology. The development of intelligence is here addressed from two usually separate perspectives, a psychometric one, and a neo-Piagetian one. Two studies are presented. In Experiment 1, children aged 6, 7, 9, and 11 years (N = 100) were administered two working memory tasks and three Piagetian tasks. In Experiment 2, children aged 8–12 years (N = 207), young adults aged 20–35 (N = 160), and older adults aged 60–88 years (N = 135) were administered working memory and processing speed tasks, as well as the Raven Standard Matrices task. Regression and commonality analyses were run to analyse the age-related variance in the Piagetian tasks (Study 1), and in the Raven task (Study 2). In both experiments, working memory accounted for a large part of the age differences observed, but more so in Study 1 (Piagetian tasks) than in Study 2 (Raven task). It is concluded that working memory mediates the effect of age on fluid intelligence during childhood and during adulthood.     

Implicit Learning of Affective Responses in Dementia Patients: A Face-Emotion-Association Paradigm

ABSTRACT

Young and older adults performed verbal and spatial storage-only and storage-plus-processing working memory tasks while performing a secondary finger tapping task, and the effects on both the maximum capacity (measured as the longest series correct) and the reliability (measured as the proportion of items correct) of working memory were assessed. Tapping tended to produce greater disruption of working memory tasks that place greater demands on executive processes (i.e., storage-plus-processing tasks compared to storage-only span tasks). Moreover, tapping produced domain-general interference, disrupting both verbal and spatial working memory, providing further support for the idea that tapping interferes with the executive component of the working memory system, rather than domain-specific maintenance processes. Nevertheless, tapping generally produced equivalent interference effects in young and older adults. Taken together, these findings are inconsistent with the hypothesis that age-related declines in working memory are primarily attributable to a deficit in the executive component.     

Exercise type relates to inhibitory and error processing functions in older adults

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the association between exercise type and inhibition of prepotent responses and error detection. Totally, 75 adults (M = 68.88 years) were classified into one of three exercise groups: those who were regular participants in open- or closed-skill forms of exercise, and those who exercised only irregularly. The participants completed a Stroop and task-switching tasks with event-related brain potentials (ERPs) recorded. The results revealed that regular exercisers displayed faster reaction times (RTs) in the Stroop task compared with irregular exercisers. The open-skill exercisers exhibited smaller N200 and larger P300a amplitudes in the Stroop task compared with irregular exercisers. Furthermore, the open-skill exercisers showed a tendency of shorter error-related negativity latencies at the task-witching test. The findings suggest that older adults may gain extra cognitive benefits in areas such as inhibition functioning and error processing from participating in open-skill forms of physical exercises.     

The Effects of Age,Sex and Alzheimer's Disease on Strategy Use During Verbal Fluency Tasks

ABSTRACT

Clustering and switching strategies during phonemic and semantic verbal fluency tasks were investigated in healthy adults (n = 193, 86 males, 20–90 years) in young, middle-aged, young–old, and old–old age groups (Study 1). Older groups produced fewer total words and lower switching scores; males relied more on clustering and females on switching to produce equivalent output. In Study 2, early Alzheimer's disease participants, compared to healthy older adults, (n = 26 per group) produced fewer total words and smaller average clusters. Sex, age, and clinical differences on switching and clustering strategies support a dual processing model of verbal fluency.     

前摄抑制对儿童注意缺陷多动障碍(ADHD)和阅读障碍的言语工作记忆的影响

ADHD和阅读障碍儿童在言语工作记忆上的缺陷得到了大量研究的证实,但是二者机制并不相同,前摄抑制对工作记忆容量产生了不利的影响,主要影响的也是中央执行功能。研究将最近探测任务和n-back任务相结合,直接比较被试在最近负探测和非最近负探测条件下记忆成绩的差异,以考察前摄抑制对两种障碍言语工作记忆的影响,被试是60名障碍儿童(阅读障碍和ADHD)和17名正常儿童,年龄均在7至12岁之间。结果发现,受前摄抑制的影响,正常被试和障碍被试成绩均明显下降,具体而言,ADHD和ADHD伴随阅读障碍组成绩大幅下滑(26.44%,28.44%),程度明显高于正常儿童和阅读障碍儿童(14.62%,15.84%),后两者差异并不明显,这说明前摄抑制是影响工作记忆容量的重要因素,并且ADHD儿童更加容易受到前摄抑制的影响,这是导致其工作记忆成绩缺损的重要原因,而阅读障碍儿童能够像正常儿童一样,在一定程度上处理前摄抑制,ADHD和阅读障碍组在言语工作记忆缺损机制上存在差异。     

Intraindividual coupling of daily stress and cognition

Most psychological theories predict associations among processes that transpire within individuals. However, these theories are often tested by examining relationships at the between-persons (BP) rather than the within-persons (WP) level. The authors examined the WP and BP relationships between daily stress and daily variability in cognitive performance. Daily stress and cognitive performance were assessed on 6 occasions in 108 older adults and 68 young adults. WP variability in stress predicted WP variability in response times (RTs) on a 2-back working memory task in both younger and older adults. That is, RTs were slower on high-stress days compared with low-stress days. There was evidence of an amplified WP stress effect in the older adults on a serial attention task. There was no evidence of stress effects on simple versions of these tasks that placed minimal demands on working memory. These results are consistent with theories that postulate that stress-related cognitive interference competes for attentional resources.     

Effects of acute aerobic exercise on multiple aspects of executive function in preadolescent children

ObjectiveThe current study assessed the effects of acute exercise on three core executive functions in preadolescents and controlled for the moderating role of age.DesignA true experimental design.MethodsThirty-four third-grade children and 53 fifth-grade preadolescents were randomly assigned into either an acute exercise group or a control group. The exercise protocol was designed for ecological validity and involved group jogging at moderate intensity for 30 min. Participants completed inhibition, working memory, and shifting-related executive function tasks prior to and following the treatment.ResultsAcute exercise facilitated performance in three executive function tasks in children in both grade groups; nevertheless, better performance was observed among the fifth graders in inhibition and working memory, but not in shifting, when compared with the third graders.ConclusionThese findings suggest that acute exercise benefited three primary aspects of executive function in general, regardless of the preadolescent age group, whereas the distinct components of executive function had different developmental trajectories.     

The effects of aerobic exercise on working memory in methamphetamine-dependent patients: Evidence from combined fNIRS and ERP

ObjectiveTo explore the effect of aerobic exercise on working memory according to exercise intensity in patients with methamphetamine (MA) dependence.DesignTwelve-week randomized controlled trial.MethodForty-five MA-dependent patients were divided randomly into three groups participating in 12-week moderate- and high-intensity aerobic exercise interventions and no intervention (control), respectively. Working memory performance was assessed using a 2-back task, and a combined functional near-infrared spectral imaging–event-related potential measure was used to identify spatial and temporal components of the neurofunctional underpinnings of this performance.ResultsHigh-intensity exercise significantly enhanced the discernment aspect of working memory. It also decreased N1 and P2 amplitudes, and increased neural activity in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.ConclusionsThe findings of this study suggest that high-intensity aerobic exercise can enhance working memory and neural activity in MA-dependent patients, and thus that it may serve as an effective therapeutic tool for these patients.     

A test of the CaR-FA-X mechanisms and depression in adolescents

ABSTRACT

People who have depression have difficulty recalling specific autobiographical information (Sumner, (2011) The mechanisms underlying overgeneral autobiographical memory: An evaluative review of evidence for the Ca R-FA-X model. Clinical Psychology Review, 3231(1), 34–48). This is called overgeneral autobiographical memory (OGM) and is associated with the development and persistence of depression. Williams, Barnhofer, Crane, Hermans, Raes, Watkins, & Dalgleish (2007 Autobiographical memory specificity and emotional disorder. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 122–148) proposed that OGM is maintained by three mechanisms: capture and rumination (CaR), functional avoidance (FA), and impaired executive control (X), and integrated these into the CaR-FA-X model. The aim of this study was to assess OGM and test the CaR-FA-X model in adolescents with low mood. We recruited 29 young people aged 12–17 with elevated symptoms of depression and 29 with minimal symptoms of depression, matched for gender and age. After controlling for IQ, adolescents with elevated depression retrieved fewer specific memories, ruminated more, and had poorer working memory and verbal fluency than adolescents with minimal depression. The groups did not differ on measures of inhibition or functional avoidance. The CaR-FA-X model was therefore partially supported. These results confirm that there is a relationship between low mood and OGM in young people and that OGM may arise as consequence of impaired working memory and verbal fluency and cognitive interference due to rumination.     

Age and probabilistic reasoning: Biases in conjunctive,disjunctive and Bayesian judgements in early and late adulthood

Probabilistic reasoning plays an essential part in many aspects of our daily routine and it has been argued that as we grow older, the need to make judgements under uncertainty becomes increasingly important. Two studies were conducted to establish whether the propensity to commit probabilistic reasoning errors increased with age. Young (aged 16–24), middle aged (25–54), and older persons (55 years and above) were included. Study 1 revealed systematic biases and errors across a range of judgement tasks. However, no evidence of any age effect in Bayesian inference, the incidence of the conjunction fallacy, or in the number of disjunction errors was found. The results obtained in Study 1 were replicated in Study 2, where the potential mediating role of working memory processes and intellectual capacity were explicitly assessed. While some aspects of probabilistic reasoning performance were correlated with measures of intelligence and working memory functioning among young adults, this was much less evident in older persons. The present findings are discussed in relation to the evolution of the dualistic heuristic–analytical system over the adult lifespan. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

老年人汉语阅读中预测误差成本的产生机制

阅读的认知加工机制随年龄变老只发生了量变还是也产生了质变,是毕生发展研究领域的重要问题。要进行有效的语言处理,读者必须结合已有的经验知识和当前语境对即将出现的信息进行预测加工。因此,要解决上述问题就要回答老年人阅读中预测加工机制发生了怎样变化,即预测误差成本是如何产生的。研究拟采用眼动脑电同步记录技术,在自然阅读过程中实时获取语言处理的行为和神经指标,聚焦老年人预测误差成本的产生机制,主要从副中央凹视觉、工作记忆负荷及语言能力三方面解释预测误差成本产生的原因。研究成果对构建汉语阅读的毕生发展模型有重要意义。     

Aging,imagery, and the bizarreness effect

ABSTRACT

This study examined the bizarre imagery effect in young and older adults, under incidental and intentional conditions. Intentionality was manipulated across experiments, with participants receiving an incidental free recall test in Experiment 1 and an intentional test in Experiment 2. This study also examined the relation between working memory resources and the bizarreness effect. In Experiment 1 young and older adults were presented with common and bizarre sentences; they later received an incidental recall test. There were no age differences in sensitivity to the bizarreness effect in Experiment 1 when ANOVAs were used to analyze the data. However, when the bizarreness effect was examined in terms of effect size, there was evidence that younger adults produced larger bizarreness effect sizes than younger adults. Experiment 2 further explored age differences in sensitivity to the bizarreness effect by presenting young and older adults with bizarre and common sentences under intentional learning conditions. Experiment 2 failed to yield age differences as a function of item type (bizarre vs. common). In addition, Experiment 2 failed to yield significant evidence that the bizarreness effect is modulated by working memory resources. The results of this study are most consistent with the distinctiveness account of the bizarreness effect.     

Being Forgotten: Implications for the Experience of Meaning in Life

ABSTRACT

Two studies investigated the effects of being forgotten on the target of memory. In Study 1, undergraduate women (N = 96) who had completed a lab session two days prior, were randomly assigned to be remembered, forgotten, complimented, or to a control group. In the absence of effects on mood or social self-esteem, being forgotten resulted in lower meaning in life. In Study 2, participants (N = 47) who had completed a group exercise were informed two days later that no one remembered them, that everyone remembered them, or that no one wanted to work with them. Being forgotten led to lower meaning in life than being remembered but did not differ from being excluded. Being forgotten may be considered a type of incipient ostracism that influences meaning in life but not mood or state social self-esteem.     

The Effects of Aging and Dual Task Demands on Language Production

ABSTRACT

A digital pursuit rotor task was used to measure dual task costs of language production by young and older adults. After training on the pursuit rotor, participants were asked to track the moving target while providing a language sample. When simultaneously engaged, young adults experienced greater dual task costs to tracking, fluency, and grammatical complexity than older adults. Older adults were able to preserve their tracking performance by speaking more slowly. Individual differences in working memory, processing speed, and Stroop interference affected vulnerability to dual task costs. These results demonstrate the utility of using a digital pursuit rotor to study the effects of aging and dual task demands on language production and confirm prior findings that young and older adults use different strategies to accommodate to dual task demands.     

Spatial Working Memory in Aging and Mild Cognitive Impairment: Effects of Task Load and Contextual Cueing

ABSTRACT

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is characterized by episodic memory deficits, while aspects of working memory may also be implicated, but studies into this latter domain are scarce and results are inconclusive. Using a computerized search paradigm, this study compares 25 young adults, 25 typically aging older adults and 15 amnestic MCI patients as to their working-memory capacities for object-location information and potential differential effects of memory load and additional context cues. An age-related deficit in visuospatial working-memory maintenance was found that became more pronounced with increasing task demands. The MCI group additionally showed reduced maintenance of bound information, i.e., object-location associations, again especially at elevated memory load. No effects of contextual cueing were found. The current findings indicate that working memory should be considered when screening patients for suspected MCI and monitoring its progression.