Age-Related Changes and the Attention Network Task: An Examination of Alerting,Orienting, and Executive Function

ABSTRACT

The effects of aging on alerting, orienting, and executive function were examined with the use of the Attention Network Task, which combines the Posner spatial cuing task and the Eriksen flanker task into a single procedure. We found that older adults showed significantly less alerting than young adults in response to a warning cue, although there were no age differences in orienting or executive function once processing speed was taken into account. We suggest that age differences in alerting may depend in part upon the presentation duration or persistence of the warning cue.     

Recollection Training and Transfer Effects in Older Adults: Successful Use of a Repetition-Lag Procedure

Abstract

We examined an approach aimed at training consciously-controlled recollection, introduced by Jennings and Jacoby (2003) Jennings, J. M. and Jacoby, L. L. 2003. Improving memory in older adults: Training recollection. Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, 13: 417–440. [CSA][CROSSREF][Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], for its ability to replicate and generalize. A continuous recognition task, requiring recollection to identify the occurrence of repeated items over gradually increasing lag intervals (number of intervening items between the first and second presentation of a repeated word), was given to a group of older adults twice a week for three weeks. Pre-and-post training performance was assessed on multiple measures and compared with a recognition practice and no contact control group. Recollection training proved successful; accurate identification of repeated items increased across a lag interval of 2 to 18 intervening items. Post-training gains following recollection training were found on n-back, self-ordered pointing, source discrimination and digit symbol substitution, but not with reading span or the CVLT-II. No changes were identified in the other groups. Gains from recollection training seem to transfer successfully in older adults.     

Neuropsychological profiles of children with depressive and anxiety disorders

The neuropsychological functioning of 56 children and young adolescents with diagnoses of unipolar depression (n = 17), anxiety disorder (n = 19), or comorbid anxiety/depressive disorder (n = 20) was examined. The neuropsychological profiles of the three groups were parallel, but not equal in level of performance. The three groups displayed similar patterns of performance with profiles suggesting diminished attention abilities. The groups, however, were not equal in level of performance. While subjects with an anxiety or a depressive disorder were similar in level of performance, subjects with a comorbid anxiety/depressive disorder generally performed worse than those with either an anxiety or depressive disorder alone. There was no significant evidence of asymmetrical cerebral dysfunction in any of the diagnostic groups. Results are discussed in relation to adult models of psychopathology with an emphasis on the importance of considering developmental factors when formulating models of childhood psychopathology.     

Tending Hestia's Flame: Circumambulating the Sacred Feminine

Hestia was the ancient goddess of the hearth, the one who presided over the religious center of the household. It was here that offerings were made at the beginning and end of the family meal, and where the other household divinities were honored. She sanctified the interior of the home and the purity of the lineage of the patriarchal clan. As the circle of Greek identity grew, eternal fires sacred to Hestia burned at the center of ancient cities, including Rome, where Hestia was known as Vesta.

From a psychological perspective, Hestia personifies the religious function of the psyche—especially the forms that turn inward and protect a sacred center. An examination of the archetypal aspects of Hestia's myth sheds light on how the instinct for the sacred found expression during antiquity, and how these energies continue to live in the archetypal psyche.     

Reframing the World: Toward an Actual Christian Doctrine of Creation

Christian theologies of creation are in crisis. They have become overly determined by questions of human origins and interaction with evolutionary theorization. They have also focused myopically on ecological concerns without thinking ecologically and holistically about the built environment in relation to racial and gender formation and multispecies connectivity and relationality. These and other problems stem from a twofold failure. We have failed to take seriously the loss of our gentile positionality in relation to reading the world as creation and we have also failed to grasp the fundamental transformation of the world with the emergence of modern colonialism. This article suggests the possibility of a reframing of a doctrine of creation to address this crisis.     

Cardiac timing and the central regulation of action

The central control of information processing necessarily entails a selection between actions that are implicit in different processing streams. We argue that this selection for action also adjusts the autonomic support for action. When actions are transiently undefined during the transition between actions, the time between heartbeats increases (heart rate transiently slows). This is particularly clear when actions are imminent but their identity is undefined, e.g. due to a delay while prepotent actions are inhibited in order to map a required action. We review results from a number of experiments supporting this perspective. These results suggest that central inhibition of representations of action influences heartbeat timing as well as more peripheral inhibition of overt responses. Given that inhibitory processes characteristic of central response selection induce transient heartbeat slowing, then this change is an interesting converging measure of the state of central response selection in combination with performance measures.     

Effect of preparation on dual-task performance in postural control

The authors applied an overlapping-task design to study the interaction between postural control and cognitive task processes in young (n = 10) and older (n = 10) adults. A rapid destabilizing floor translation was followed at specific time intervals by a simple auditory reaction time (RT) task. The translations were preceded by either an informational cue or no cue. Interference between postural task demands and the RT task was found only in the first 50 ms. Cueing also had an effect on both the onset of the postural recovery response and RT performance. The results suggest (a) only a brief interference between postural and cognitive processing demands in relatively easy tasks, (b) competition for a common central mechanism, possibly a response-selection mechanism, and (c) no differential impact of aging on that interaction.     

Using stimulus equivalence‐based instruction to teach young children their caregivers' contact information

Stimulus equivalence‐based instruction (EBI) was used to teach young children of typical development three 4‐member equivalence classes containing contact information from three caregivers (e.g., mother, father, and grandmother). Each class comprised the caregiver's (a) photograph, (b) printed name, (c) printed phone number, and (d) printed name of employer. A pretest‐train‐posttest‐maintenance design with a nontreatment control group comparison was used. Pretests and posttests assessed the degree to which class‐consistent responding occurred across both visual–visual matching tasks and intraverbals. Intraverbal responding was also probed with a novel instructor. Overall, EBI participants scored significantly higher during the posttests than the control participants across both the derived relations and intraverbal tests. These differences maintained 2 weeks later. Thus, responding generalized to (a) a different topography (i.e., intraverbal), (b) auditory versions of the stimuli, and (c) in the presence of a novel instructor. How such procedures may benefit lost children are discussed.