Secular Changes in Masters Swimming Performances: A 40-Year Follow Up.

Archival records of US Masters Swimming performances were examined for changes between 1981 and 2021. Both national records and top 10 swimmers were used. Substantial secular changes were found averaging 0.52%/yr, with women improving more than men and with improvements in national records greater than in the top 10. Performances by women in 2021 were at parity (national records) or near parity (top 10) with men in 1981. The results indicate that secular effects must be considered along with longitudinal age-related changes and cross-sectional cohort effects in interpreting age differences in physiological function.

Successful aging: The role of cognitive gerontology.

This commentary explores the relationships between the construct of successful aging and the experimental psychology of human aging-cognitive gerontology. What can or should cognitive gerontology contribute to understanding, defining, and assessing successful aging? Standards for successful aging reflect value judgments that are culturally and historically situated. Fundamentally, they address social policy; they are prescriptive. If individuals or groups are deemed to be aging successfully, then their characteristics or situations can be emulated. If an individual or a group is deemed to be aging unsuccessfully, then intervention should be considered. Although science is never culture-free or ahistorical, cognitive gerontology is primarily descriptive of age-related change. It is not prescriptive. It is argue that cognitive gerontology has little to contribute to setting standards for successful aging. If, however, better cognitive function is taken as a marker of more successful aging-something not universally accepted-then cognitive gerontology can play an important assessment role. It has a great deal to contribute in determining whether an individual or a group evidences better cognitive function than another. More importantly, cognitive gerontology can provide tools to evaluate the effects of interventions. It can provide targeted measures of perception, attention, memory, executive function, and other facets of cognition that are more sensitive to change than most clinical measures. From a deep understanding of factors affecting cognitive function, cognitive gerontology can also suggest possible interventions. A brief narrative review of interventions that have and have not led to improved cognitive function in older adults. Finally, the enormous range is addressed in the estimates of the proportion of the population that meets a standard for aging successfully, from less than 10% to more than 90%. For research purposes, it would be better to replace absolute cutoffs with correlational approaches (e.g., Freund & Baltes, 1998, Psychology and Aging, 13, 531-543). For policy purposes, cutoffs are necessary, but we propose that assessments of successful aging be based not on absolute cutoffs but on population proportions. An example of one possible standard is this: Those more than 1 standard deviation above the mean are aging successfully; those more than 1 standard deviation below the mean are aging unsuccessfully; those in between are aging usually. Adoption of such a standard may reduce the wide discrepancies in the incidence of successful aging reported in the literature.

Joint Attention is Slowed in Older Adults.

BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: The automatic propensity to orient to the location where other people are looking is the main way of establishing joint attention with others. Whereas joint attention has been mostly investigated with young adults, the present study examines age-related differences in the magnitude and time course of joint attention. METHODS: Forty-three community-dwelling seniors and 43 younger adults performed a visuospatial task. The procedures closely follow those of gaze-cueing tasks commonly used to investigate joint attention. RESULTS: The findings revealed that a gaze-cueing effect occurs for both younger and older adults, with an equivalent average magnitude but with different time courses. The effect peaks later in older adults. CONCLUSION: Age-related differences in joint attention could be linked to a more general cognitive slowing rather than to poorer basic social skills. The present study adds to the growing interest in gerontological research regarding social attention.

The braking force in walking: age-related differences and improvement in older adults with exergame training.

The purposes of this present research were, in the first study, to determine whether age impacts a measure of postural control (the braking force in walking) and, in a second study, to determine whether exergame training in physically-simulated sport activity would show transfer, increasing the braking force in walking and also improving balance assessed by clinical measures, functional fitness, and health-related quality of life in older adults. For the second study, the authors developed an active video game training program (using the Wii system) with a pretest-training-posttest design comparing an experimental group (24 1-hr sessions of training) with a control group. Participants completed a battery comprising balance (braking force in short and normal step conditions), functional fitness (Senior Fitness Test), and health-related quality of life (SF-36). Results show that 12 weeks of video game-based exercise program training improved the braking force in the normal step condition, along with the functional fitness of lower limb strength, cardiovascular endurance, and motor agility, as measured by the Senior Fitness Test. Only the global mental dimension of the SF-36 was sensitive to exergame practice. Exergames appear to be an effective way to train postural control in older adults. Because of the multimodal nature of the activity, exergames provide an effective tool for remediation of age-related problems.

Age-related similarities and differences in cognitive and neural processing revealed by task-related microstate analysis.

We explored neural processing differences associated with aging across four cognitive functions. In addition to ERP analysis, we included task-related microstate analyses, which identified stable states of neural activity across the scalp over time, to explore whole-head neural activation differences. Younger and older adults (YA, OA) completed face perception (N170), word-pair judgment (N400), visual oddball (P3), and flanker (ERN) tasks. Age-related effects differed across tasks. Despite age-related delayed latencies, N170 ERP and microstate analyses indicated no age-related differences in amplitudes or microstates. However, age-related condition differences were found for P3 and N00 amplitudes and scalp topographies: smaller condition differences were found for in OAs as well as broader centroparietal scalp distributions. Age group comparisons for the ERN revealed similar focal frontocentral activation loci, but differential activation patterns. Our findings of differential age effects across tasks are most consistent with the STAC-r framework which proposes that age-related effects differ depending on the resources available and the kinds of processing and cognitive load required of various tasks.

Assigned value improves memory of proper names.

Names are more difficult to remember than other personal information such as occupations. The current research examined the influence of assigned point value on memory and metamemory judgements for names and occupations to determine whether incentive can improve recall of proper names. In Experiment 1 participants studied face-name and face-occupation pairs assigned 1 or 10 points, made judgements of learning, and were given a cued recall test. High-value names were recalled more often than low-value names. However, recall of occupations was not influenced by value. In Experiment 2 meaningless nonwords were used for both names and occupations. The name difficulty disappeared, and value influenced recall of both names and occupations. Thus value similarly influenced names and occupations when meaningfulness was held constant. In Experiment 3 participants were required to use overt rote rehearsal for all items. Value did not boost recall of high-value names, suggesting that differential processing could not be implemented to improve memory. Thus incentives may improve memory for proper names by motivating people to engage in selective rehearsal and effortful elaborative processing.

Information interference and loss in a dual task situation: Task 1, choice reaction time; Task 2, unspeeded recall.

The extraction and maintenance of second task information was explored in four dual task experiments. A variant of the psychological refractory period procedure was used with the first task, a speeded choice reaction to a tone and the second task, the unspeeded recall of letter triplets. Prior research had shown that recall accuracy dropped as the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) decreased and task overlap increased. This could be due to interference with extracting perceptual information or to loss of the information while awaiting central resources. All four experiments showed evidence of interference, with the accuracy of recall for the first letter recalled relatively unaffected by SOA but with accuracy for later letters dropping as SOA decreased. Two of the experiments showed evidence for loss of second task information, with accuracy lower on trials with longer first task reaction times. The two other experiments showed loss of information when either the response complexity of Task 1 or the perceptual encoding difficulty was increased, increasing the processing time. The observed interference was attributed to slowed extraction of perceptual information. The observed loss was consistent with the encoded information being held in a fragile temporary store, susceptible to loss until consolidated into short-term memory. The evidence showed that the interference and the loss were independent processes.

Electrophysiological concomitants of pupillary synchrony.

Pupillary synchrony or contagion is the automatic unconscious mimicry of pupil dilation in dyadic interactions. This experiment explored electrophysiological event-related potential (ERP) concomitants of pupillary synchrony. Artificial pupils (black dots) were superimposed on either partial faces (eyes, nose, brow) or random textures. Observers were asked to judge dot size (large, medium, or small). There was clear evidence of pupillary synchrony with observer pupil dilation greater to large dots than to small or medium dots. The pupillary synchrony increased in magnitude throughout the trial and was found both with faces and with textures. When the stimuli were partial faces with artificial pupils (dots), there was ERP activity related to target dot size in the period at P250 and P3. A face specific N170 was also found. When the stimuli were random textures with dots, there was ERP activity at P1 and in the interval from 140 to 200 ms post-stimulus onset. The use of ERP with pupillometry revealed results for faces that were consistent with a social explanation of pupillary synchrony whereas results for textures were consistent with a local luminance explanation.

Electrodermal responses to sources of dual-task interference.

There is a response selection bottleneck that is responsible for dual-task interference. How the response selection bottleneck operates was addressed in three dual-task experiments. The overlap between two tasks (as indexed by the stimulus onset asynchrony [SOA]) was systematically manipulated, and both reaction time and electrodermal activity were measured. In addition, each experiment also manipulated some aspect of the difficulty of either task. Both increasing task overlap by reducing SOA and increasing the difficulty of either task lengthened reaction times. Electrodermal response was strongly affected by task difficulty but was only weakly affected by SOA, and in a different manner from reaction time. A fourth experiment found that the subjectively perceived difficulty of a dual-task trial was affected both by task difficulty and by SOA, but in different ways than electrodermal activity. Overall, the results were not consistent with a response selection bottleneck that involves processes of voluntary, executive attention. Instead, the results converge with findings from neural network modeling to suggest that the delay of one task while another is being processed reflects the operation of a routing mechanism that can process only one stream of information for action at a time and of a passive, structural store that temporarily holds information for the delayed task. The results suggest that conventional blocked or event-related neuroimaging designs may be inadequate to identify the mechanism of operation of the response selection bottleneck.

Equivalent pupillary mimicry in younger and older adults.

Pupillary contagion is a form of autonomic mimicry in which faces with dilated pupils elicit larger pupils in observers whereas faces with constricted pupils elicit smaller pupils. Autonomic reactivity may be fundamental to higher order social processes, yet older adults may be less likely to register other's autonomic signals. We explored pupillary contagion in younger and older adult observers. We presented younger and older observers with partial-face photographs of women with the pupils manipulated to be small, medium, or large. The faces were either young (20s) or old (70s). There were two tasks: To judge the model's age and to judge which pupil was larger. In the pupil judgment task, the magnitude of response was lower in older adults than in younger adults, but both younger and older observers showed equivalent pupillary contagion. In the age judgment task, which did not draw attention to the pupils, we found no evidence of pupillary contagion in either age-group. Registration of the autonomic signal of pupil dilation does not appear to be impaired in older adults. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Dual-task processing in younger and older adults: similarities and differences revealed by fMRI.

fMRI was used to explore age differences in the neural substrate of dual-task processing. Brain activations when there was a 100 ms SOA between tasks, and task overlap was high, were contrasted with activations when there was a 1000 ms SOA, and first task processing was largely complete before the second task began. Younger adults (M=21 yrs) showed activation in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and in parietal areas as well as in ventral medial frontal cortex and sub-lobar areas. Activations in older adults (M=71 yrs) did not differ significantly from younger adults except for higher activations in occipital and polar prefrontal cortex. The results were well fit by a model with two networks managing dual-task interference, a medial prefrontal network that detects changes in the stimulus situation and maps them to associated changes in the valence of response mappings and a lateral frontal-parietal network that initiates and carries out the shift from one task to the other. The additional activations in older adults as a group and the correlations of individual differences in activation with performance were consistent with recruitment within each of these networks. Alternative explanations such as hemispheric asymmetry reduction and reactive rather than proactive processing in older adults were not supported.

Cognitive Training Game Versus Action Videogame: Effects on Cognitive Functions in Older Adults.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of the study was to compare a cognitive training game, Kawashima Brain Training (KBT), and an action videogame, Super Mario Bros (SMB), in their effects on cognitive function in older adults. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Thirty-six older adults were randomly assigned to the KBT group, the SMB group, or the no-training no-contact control group. All participants completed several cognitive tests [matrix reasoning, Stroop, Trail Making Test, digit symbol substitution test (DSST), Corsi clock, spatial relation, and number comparison]. Then, participants in the game groups were instructed to play the videogame (KBT or SMB) for 1 hour, thrice per week, during 2 months, for a total training time of 24 hours. When the twenty-four 1-hour game sessions were complete, the three groups again completed the cognitive tests. RESULTS: Analysis of variances on each of the cognitive measures and Tukey's post hoc tests showed that the matrix reasoning change score was significantly greater in both game groups than in the control group. The Stroop test change was significantly greater in the KBT group than in control and SMB groups. The DSST, Corsi block test, spatial relations test, and number comparison test showed significantly greater change in the SMB group than in the control group with KBT intermediate. CONCLUSION: The scope of benefits of SMB training seems broader than those from the KBT program. The intrinsic characteristics of SMB and KBT games may well be partly responsible for these differences.

Intact Procedural Knowledge in Patients with Alzheimer's Disease: Evidence from Golf Putting.

Can Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients efficiently learn to perform a complex motor skill when relying on procedural knowledge? To address this question, the authors compared the golf-putting performance of AD patients, older adults, and younger adults in 2 different learning situations: one that promotes high error rates (thus increasing the reliance on declarative knowledge) or one that promotes low error rates (thus increasing the reliance on procedural knowledge). Motor performance was poorer overall for AD patients and older adults relative to younger adults in the high-error condition but equivalent between similar groups in the low-error condition. Also, AD patients in the low-error condition had better performance at the final putting distance relative to those in the high-error condition. This performance facilitation for AD patients likely stems from intact procedural knowledge.

Success and failure at dual-task coordination by younger and older adults.

Dual-task processing was explored in younger and older adults in 2 experiments that used a tone discrimination and a letter discrimination task. To encourage parallel processing if that was possible, the authors presented the stimuli for the 2 tasks simultaneously, and participants were instructed to withhold their responses until both were ready. The authors found no evidence for parallel processing and no evidence that the management of central processing of dual tasks is qualitatively different in older adults than it is in younger adults. When one response was verbal and the other manual, the 2 responses closely coincided. When both responses were manual, the authors did find that the first response was not delayed enough to coincide with the 2nd and that this underestimation was greater in older adults.

Attentional effects of hand proximity occur later in older adults: Evidence from event-related potentials.

Research with young adults has shown hand proximity biases attention both early (by the time stimuli are categorized as relevant for action) and later, selectively for goal-relevant-stimuli. We examined age-related changes in this multisensory integration of vision and proprioception by comparing behavior and event-related potentials (ERPs) between younger and older adults. In a visual detection task, the hand was placed near or kept far from target and nontarget stimuli matched for frequency and visual features. Although a behavioral hand proximity effect-faster response times for stimuli appearing near the hand-was found for both age groups, a proportionately larger effect was found for younger adults. ERPs revealed age-related differences in the time course of the hand's effect on visual processing. Younger adults showed selective increases in contralateral N1 and parietal P3 amplitudes for targets near the hand, but older adults only showed hand effects at the P3 which were accompanied by concurrent neural activity in bilateral frontal regions. This neural pattern suggests that compared with younger adults, older adults may produce the behavioral hand proximity effect by integrating hand position and visual inputs relying more on later, task-related, frontal attentional mechanisms and less on early, posterior, multisensory integration. (PsycINFO Database Record

Backward compatibility effects in younger and older adults.

In many dual-task situations, responses to the second of two tasks are slowed when the time between tasks is short. The response-selection bottleneck model of dual-task performance accounts for this phenomenon by assuming that central processing of the second task is blocked by a bottleneck until central processing of Task 1 is complete. This assumption could be called into question if it could be demonstrated that the response to Task 2 affected the central processing of Task 1, a backward response compatibility effect. Such effects are well-established in younger adults. Backward compatibility effects in older (as well as younger) adults were explored in two experiments. The first experiment found clear backward response compatibility effects for younger adults but no evidence of them for older adults. The second experiment explored backward stimulus compatibility and found similar effects in both younger and older adults. Evidence possibly consistent with some pre-bottleneck processing of Task 2 central stages also was found in the second experiment in both age groups. For younger adults, the results provide further evidence falsifying the claim of an immutable response selection bottleneck. For older adults, the evidence suggested that Task 2 affects Task 1 when there is stimulus compatibility but not when there is response compatibility.

Ideomotor-compatible tasks partially escape dual-task interference in both young and elderly adults.

Under most circumstances, it is not possible to carry out central processing for 2 tasks at the same time; effectively there is a bottleneck. Nevertheless, in 2 experiments it is demonstrated here that both younger and older adults are able to partially bypass the bottleneck in a psychological refractory period procedure, even without extensive training, when the 2nd of the 2 tasks is a saccade or a body tilt in the direction of rotation of a visual stimulus. Consistent with earlier research, the findings showed that younger adults can bypass when the second task has ideomotor-compatible stimuli and responses. Most strikingly, they demonstrated that bypass can also occur in older adults. Overall, the findings are inconsistent with any categorical claim that younger adults can bypass the dual-task bottleneck whereas older adults cannot. The construct of ideomotor-compatible tasks may comprise 2 quite different classes of experimental procedures.

An Age-Related Dissociation of Short-Term Memory for Facial Identity and Facial Emotional Expression.

BACKGROUND: Memory for both facial emotional expression and facial identity was explored in younger and older adults in 3 experiments using a delayed match-to-sample procedure. METHOD: Memory sets of 1, 2, or 3 faces were presented, which were followed by a probe after a 3-s retention interval. RESULTS: There was very little difference between younger and older adults in memory for emotional expressions, but memory for identity was substantially impaired in the older adults. DISCUSSION: Possible explanations for spared memory for emotional expressions include socioemotional selectivity theory as well as the existence of overlapping yet distinct brain networks for processing of different emotions.

Can practice overcome age-related differences in the psychological refractory period effect?

Can dual-task practice remove age-related differences in the psychological refractory period (PRP) effect? To answer this question, younger and older individuals practiced 7 blocks of a PRP design, in which Task 1 (T1) required a vocal response to an auditory stimulus and Task 2 (T2) required a manual response to a visual stimulus (Experiment 1). The results showed that practice did not reduce, but rather increased, age-related differences in PRP interference. Using the trained individuals, the introduction of a less complex new T1 (Experiment 2) or a less complex new T2 (Experiment 3) with the task previously practiced reduced the PRP interference but only in older adults. The authors propose that older adults suffer from a large task-switch cost that is more sensitive to task complexity than to the amount of practice.

Sexual distractors boost younger and older adults' visual search RSVP performance.

Do sexual words have high attentional priority? How does the ability to ignore sexual distractors evolve with age? To answer these questions, two experiments using Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) were conducted. Experiment 1 showed that both younger and older participants were better at identifying a target (the name of a colour) when it was preceded by 336 ms by a sexual word rather than by a musical word. Strikingly, the sexual-word advantage was more pronounced for older adults than for younger adults. Experiment 2 showed that introducing a variable delay between the distractor and the target eliminated the sexual-word advantage. This finding suggests that the sexual-word advantage found in Experiment 1 was due to learning to utilize the sexual word as a temporal cue with a fixed duration between the distractor and the target. Contrary to previous research [Arnell et al., 2007, Emotion, 7, 465), neither experiment showed that sexual words produce an attentional blink.