Aging, Training, and the Brain: A Review and Future Directions

As the population ages, the need for effective methods to maintain or even improve older adults’ cognitive performance becomes increasingly pressing. Here we provide a brief review of the major intervention approaches that have been the focus of past research with healthy older adults (strategy training, multi-modal interventions, cardiovascular exercise, and process-based training), and new approaches that incorporate neuroimaging. As outcome measures, neuroimaging data on intervention-related changes in volume, structural integrity; and functional activation can provide important insights into the nature and duration of an intervention’s effects. Perhaps even more intriguingly, several recent studies have used neuroimaging data as a guide to identify core cognitive processes that can be trained in one task with effective transfer to other tasks that share the same underlying processes. Although many open questions remain, this research has greatly increased our understanding of how to promote successful aging of cognition and the brain.     

Coregulation, dysregulation, self-regulation: an integrative analysis and empirical agenda for understanding adult attachment, separation, loss, and recovery.

An integrative framework is proposed for understanding how multiple biological and psychological systems are regulated in the context of adult attachment relationships, dysregulated by separation and loss experiences, and, potentially, re-regulated through individual recovery efforts. Evidence is reviewed for a coregulatory model of normative attachment, defined as a pattern of interwoven physiology between romantic partners that results from the conditioning of biological reward systems and the emergence of felt security within adult pair bonds. The loss of coregulation can portend a state of biobehavioral dysregulation, ranging from diffuse psychophysiological arousal and disorganization to a full-blown (and highly organized) stress response. The major task for successful recovery is adopting a self-regulatory strategy that attenuates the dysregulating effects of the attachment disruption. Research evidence is reviewed across multiple levels of analysis, and the article concludes with a series of testable research questions on the interconnected nature of attachment, loss, and recovery processes.     

How to keep a reversible figure from reversing: teasing out top-down and bottom-up processes

The nature of processes underlying our perception of reversible figures was examined through two experiments investigating the effects of prior exposure conditions on an observer's report of figural reversal. In experiment 1, observers were adapted over several minutes to an unambiguous version of a rotating Necker cube prior to the presentation of the standard ambiguous figure. Results indicated that adaptation produced an immediate bias to perceive the ambiguous figure in the opposite configuration (ie reverse bias) and to reduce reports of reversal over the test period. The introduction of a brief delay between the adaptation and test periods revealed that this bias is a highly transient effect and is only clearly evident when the adaptation and test figures are matched in size. In experiment 2, observers were primed with an unambiguous figure for a few seconds prior to the presentation of the standard ambiguous figure. In this case, the obtained bias strongly favored the observer's reporting the ambiguous figure to be in the same configuration as the adapting figure (ie positive bias); and neither introducing a delay period nor changing figure size had any effect. We conclude that these experiments reveal the distinct roles of transient, retinally localized neural processes as well as more stable, global processes under specifiable conditions.