Where cognitive development and aging meet: face learning ability peaks after age 30

Research on age-related cognitive change traditionally focuses on either development or aging, where development ends with adulthood and aging begins around 55 years. This approach ignores age-related changes during the 35 years in-between, implying that this period is uninformative. Here we investigated face recognition as an ability that may mature late relative to other abilities. Using data from over 60,000 participants, we traced the ability to learn new faces from pre-adolescence through middle age. In three separate experiments, we show that face learning ability improves until just after age 30 – even though other putatively related abilities (inverted face recognition and name recognition) stop showing age-related improvements years earlier. Our data provide the first behavioral evidence for late maturation of face processing and the dissociation of face recognition from other abilities over time demonstrates that studies on adult age development can provide insight into the organization and development of cognitive systems.     

Subjective age in a modern Japanese young, middle-age, and upper middle-age sample

The subjective age perception of a Japanese sample of 1,459 (ages in the 20s to 80s) was surveyed, and participants were asked to give their subjective psychological ages. Irrespective of the cohort, participants felt their subjective age to be younger than their chronological age, and a cohort difference was found in the size of the discrepancy. The middle- and upper middle-age generations (50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s) showed a larger discrepancy than that of prior tested young adults (20s and 30s). A cross-cultural comparison was conducted, and possible reasons for the discrepancy between subjective and chronological ages were examined.     

Masked priming with orthographic neighbors: a test of the lexical competition assumption

In models of visual word identification that incorporate inhibitory competition among activated lexical units, a word's higher frequency neighbors will be the word's strongest competitors. Preactivation of these neighbors by a prime is predicted to delay the word's identification. Using the masked priming paradigm (K. I. Forster & C. Davis, 1984, J. Segui and J. Grainger (1990) reported that, consistent with this prediction, a higher frequency neighbor prime delayed the responses to a lower frequency target, whereas a lower frequency neighbor prime did not delay the responses to a higher frequency target. In the present experiments, using English stimuli, it was found that this pattern held only when the primes and targets had few neighbors; when the primes and targets had many neighbors, lower frequency primes delayed responses to higher frequency targets essentially as much as higher frequency primes delayed responses to lower frequency targets. Several possible explanations for these findings are discussed along with their theoretical implications. Considered together, the results are most consistent with activation-based accounts of the masked priming effect.     

A case study of an English-Japanese bilingual with monolingual dyslexia

We report the case of AS, a 16 year-old English/Japanese bilingual boy, whose reading/writing difficulties are confined to English only. AS was born in Japan to a highly literate Australian father and English mother, and goes to a Japanese selective senior high school in Japan. His spoken language at home is English. AS's reading in logographic Japanese Kanji and syllabic Kana is equivalent to that of Japanese undergraduates or graduates. In contrast, his performance in various reading and writing tests in English as well as tasks involving phonological processing was very poor, even when compared to his Japanese contemporaries. Yet he has no problem with letter names or letter sounds, and his phoneme categorisation is well within the normal range of English native speakers. In order to account for our data that show a clear dissociation between AS's ability to read English and Japanese, we put forward the ‘hypothesis of granularity and transparency'. It is postulated that any language where orthography-to-phonology mapping is transparent, or even opaque, or any language whose orthographic unit representing sound is coarse (i.e. at a whole character or word level) should not produce a high incidence of developmental phonological dyslexia.     

Priming of pop-out: I. Role of features

We examined a visual search task, in which observers responded to the high-acuity aspect of a popout target (shape of an odd-colored diamond or vernier offset of an odd spatial-frequency patch). Repetition of the attention-driving feature (color or spatial frequency) in this task primes the popout; repetition of the high-acuity aspect (shape, vernier offset) does not. Priming of pop-out is due to a decaying memory trace of the attention-focusing feature laid down with each trial. The trace exerts a diminishing effect over the following five to eight trials (≈30 sec), and its influence over this time is cumulative. Observers cannot willfully overcome the priming, which suggests that it is passive and autonomous. Both target facilitation and distractor inhibition are evident; the former has a greater effect. The phenomenon shows complete binocular transfer.     

Digit memory of soroban experts: Evidence of utilization of mental imagery

Two experiments were conducted to demonstrate that skilled soroban (Japanese abacus) operators can improve digit memory retention by manipulating the beads of a ‘mental soroban’ which is analogous to the actual one. In Experiment 1, soroban experts and control subjects were given two digit memory tasks. In one task, pictures of a soroban figure and in the other, pictures of digit sequences, were presented to the subjects during the retention interval. Soroban experts experienced greater interference from presentation of the soroban figures than the digits; on the other hand, the reverse was true in the control subjects. In Experiment 2, ther soroban experts and control subjects were given the same digit memory tasks under three conditions—soroban pictures, pictures of digit sequences, and human faces were presented to subjects during the retention period of 15 s. The soroban experts were more affected by the presentation of the soroban figures than by the faces or digits, whereas the controls showed more interference from the digits than by the presentation of faces or soroban pictures.     

Age,Emotion Regulation,and Affect in Adulthood: The Mediating Role of Cognitive Reappraisal

Evidence indicates that older adults experience high levels of emotional well‐being. However, little is known empirically about the underlying mechanism of this state. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether emotion regulation mediates the link between age and affect in adulthood. The sample consisted of 516 Japanese participants aged 30 (±1), 50 (±1), and 70 (±1) years, who were registered with an Internet survey company. Cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression were measured as emotion regulation strategies. Positive and negative affect were assessed. Older participants reported lower negative affect than younger participants, while positive affect was not correlated with age. Cognitive reappraisal partially mediated the relationship between age and affect, whereas expressive suppression did not. The results suggested that age‐related increase in cognitive reappraisal could contribute to improvements in affect, but that another adaptive form of emotion regulation may mediate the relationship between age and affect. Our study thus indicates that developments in emotion regulation could explain the mechanism of stable everyday affect throughout adulthood, and that researchers should further explore another form of adaptive emotion regulation.