An age-related deficit in prefrontal cortical function associated with refreshing information

Older adults are slower than young adults to think of an item they just saw, that is, to engage or execute (or both) the simple reflective operation of refreshing just-activated information. In addition, they derive less long-term memory benefit from refreshing information. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that relative to young adults, older adults showed reduced refresh-related activity in an area of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (left middle frontal gyrus, Brodmann's Area 9), but not in other refresh-related areas. This provides strong evidence that a frontal component of the circuit that subserves this basic cognitive process is especially vulnerable to aging. Such a refresh deficit could contribute to poorer performance of older than young adults on a wide range of cognitive tasks.     

The relationship between personality, approach to learning and academic performance

This study considers the relationship between students' approaches to learning, as measured by a short-form of Entwistle and Tait's (1995) Revised Approaches to Studying Inventory (RASI), the Big Five personality factors, as measured by Cattell's 16PFi, and the background variables of age, gender and prior educational achievement and academic performance. Subjects were 146 social science undergraduate students at a university in Scotland. Structural equation modelling identifies the Big Five personality factor scores account for between 22.7% and 43.6% of the variance across scores on the three approach to learning dimensions. Four of the Big Five personality factors and the three approach to learning dimensions were found to be poor predictors of academic performance. A linear regression analysis with academic performance as the dependent variable and age, prior educational attainment and conscientiousness as independent variables, accounted for 24.1% of the variance in performance. Our investigation suggests approach to learning is a subset of personality. However, we conclude it makes sense to measure these two groups of variables separately in educational settings.     

Agentic and Communal Generative Behavior in Four Areas of Adult Life: Implications for Psychological Well-Being

Fifty mothers and 48 fathers of soon-to-be-independent children were interviewed to determine how agentic and communal generative themes would be reflected in parenting, occupation, volunteer work, and leisure activities. Mothers reported more communal themes (F5, 83 = 2.32, p <.05). Correlations between generativity and well-being resulted in a negative relationship for mothers in parenting communal generative acts (r = –.41, p = .007) and total generative acts (r = –.3, p = .05) as assessed by the interview. Negative correlations also emerged between mothers' well-being and communal generative acts from the Generative Behavior Checklist, (r = –.33, p = .02).     

Adult Age Invariance in Sentence Unitization

We examined age differences on a letter detection task that was performed on four-word sentences in order to examine how letter-level and word-level processing is integrated with sentence-level unitization. Sentence-level unitization is defined as the formation of a sentence-level code that delays access to letter-level or word-level codes. There was a consistent word-frequency disadvantage for both age groups in which it took longer to detect letters within high and medium high frequency words than in low frequency words. This finding suggested that word-level and letter-level input channels were involved in a parallel “horse race” to the central processor while simultaneously outputting codes to the sentence-level at the second tier of processing. The present data also revealed that both age groups showed a larger relative increase in reaction time for letter detection for the fourth word position compared to the third word position on syntactically “intact” sentences relative to syntactically “scrambled” sentences. These data indicated that both age groups formed sentence-level codes that made letter-level codes more difficult to access. Finally, older adults' data showed a larger cost than younger adults' data for scrambled sentences than for intact sentences. These results suggest that older adults are more reliant on a syntactical processor that facilitates the parafoveal preview during the reading of syntactically intact sentences. These data suggest that whereas there are age differences in the perceptual processing of letters and words, sentence unitization and syntactical processing remain intact with increasing adult age.     

Enhancing Salesperson Trust: An Examination of Managerial Values,Empowerment, and the Moderating Influence of SBU Strategy

Within a sales environment, the development and conveyance of managerial values play a critical role in enhancing salesperson trust and performance. This study identifies specific managerial values (i.e., integration, flexibility, control, spontaneity, etc.) that support particular business strategies (i.e., prospector, defender, or analyzer). The proposed model investigates the impact of aligning managerial value systems to SBU type on building trusting relationships within a manager–salesperson context. Study results suggest various implications for managers.     

Preserved spatial memory over brief intervals in older adults

Two studies compared young and older adults' memory for location information after brief intervals. Experiment 1 found that accuracy of intentional spatial memory for individual locations was similar in young and older participants for set sizes of 3 and 6. Both groups also encoded individual locations in relation to the larger configuration of locations. Experiment 2 showed that like young adults, older adults' latency to respond to a test probe in a letter working memory task was negatively influenced by spatial information that was irrelevant to the task. This interference effect indicated preserved incidental memory for spatial information in older adults. Together, these data suggest that initial encoding of spatial information for relatively small numbers of items is largely preserved in healthy older adults and that representations of spatial information persist over short intervals.     

The effect of colour congruency on shape discriminations of novel objects

Although visual object recognition is primarily shape driven, colour assists the recognition of some objects. It is unclear, however, just how colour information is coded with respect to shape in long-term memory and how the availability of colour in the visual image facilitates object recognition. We examined the role of colour in the recognition of novel, 3-D objects by manipulating the congruency of object colour across the study and test phases, using an old/new shape-identification task. In experiment 1, we found that participants were faster at correctly identifying old objects on the basis of shape information when these objects were presented in their original colour, rather than in a different colour. In experiments 2 and 3, we found that participants were faster at correctly identifying old objects on the basis of shape information when these objects were presented with their original part-colour conjunctions, rather than in different or in reversed part-colour conjunctions. In experiment 4, we found that participants were quite poor at the verbal recall of part-colour conjunctions for correctly identified old objects, presented as grey-scale images at test. In experiment 5, we found that participants were significantly slower at correctly identifying old objects when object colour was incongruent across study and test, than when background colour was incongruent across study and test. The results of these experiments suggest that both shape and colour information are stored as part of the long-term representation of these novel objects. Results are discussed in terms of how colour might be coded with respect to shape in stored object representations.     

Do Overgeneral Autobiographical Memories Predict Increased Psychopathological Symptoms in Community Youth? A 3-Year Longitudinal Investigation

Research suggests that an overgeneral autobiographical memory style (i.e., retrieval of general memories when instructed to retrieve a specific episodic memory) represents a vulnerability marker for depression. Although adolescence is a period of high risk for the emergence of depression, little research has investigated the associations among overgeneral memory, psychopathology, and risk factors longitudinally in a community sample in this age group. We, therefore, investigated overgeneral memory, psychopathology (depression and anxiety), and rumination (an established risk factor for psychopathology) longitudinally in 269 typically-developing youth (125 females, 144 males) across 3 annual assessment points. We sought to determine whether 1) overgeneral memory would predict psychopathology across the entire sample, and 2) whether associations would vary as a function of longitudinal rumination growth. Across the entire sample, overgeneral memory did not predict psychopathology. For youth who reported elevated, and increasing, patterns of rumination over time, transient relationships between overgeneral memory and subsequent increases in anxiety were found. We conclude that overgeneral memory may represent a vulnerability marker for adverse psychological outcomes only for youth at risk for psychopathology.