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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Attention's grasp: early and late hand proximity effects on visual evoked potentials.

Behavioral studies suggest that visual attention is biased toward stimuli in the region of space near the palm of the hand, but it is unclear whether this effect is universal or selective for goal/task-related stimuli. We examined event-related potentials (ERPs) using a visual detection task in which the hand was placed near or kept far from target and non-target stimuli that were matched for frequency and visual features to avoid confounding factors. Focusing on attention-sensitive ERP components, we found that P3 (350-450 ms) amplitudes were increased for Hand Near conditions for targets only, demonstrating a selective effect consistent with the P3's cross-modal and task-relevance influences. An N1 variant implicated in visuo-tactile integration (central Nd1; 120-190 ms) showed similar target-specific effects. P1 (80-110 ms) effects for target stimuli were also apparent, but may have applied to non-targets as well, which would be consistent with the P1's association with early, pre-categorical increases in sensory gain. Collectively, these findings suggest that by the time stimuli are categorized as relevant/irrelevant for action, the proprioceptive effects of the hand on visual attention are selective for goal/task-related stimuli. At the same time, hand proximity appears to bias attention early, starting with a facilitation of processing for perhaps any visual stimuli near the hand, and continuing with enhancements that are selective to those stimuli categorized as task-relevant.

Lost ability to automatize task performance in old age.

Can elderly adults automatize a new task? To address this question, 10 older adults each performed 10,080 training trials over 12 sessions on an easy but novel task. The psychological refractory period (PRP) procedure was then used to evaluate whether this highly practiced task, when presented as task 2 along with an unpracticed task 1, could proceed automatically. If automatic, task 2 processing should bypass the bottleneck and, therefore, not be delayed while central attention is devoted to task 1, yielding little dual-task interference. This is exactly what Maquestiaux, Laguë-Beauvais, Ruthruff, and Bherer (Memory and Cognition 36:1262-1282, 2008) previously observed for almost all younger adults, even with half the training on a more difficult task. Although extensive training reduced older adults' reaction times to only 307 ms, a value virtually identical to that attained by Maquestiaux et al.'s (Memory and Cognition 36:1262-1282, 2008) younger adults, the highly practiced task 2 was slowed by 485 ms in the dual-task PRP procedure. Such a large slowing in older adults is striking given the easy tasks and massive amounts of practice. These findings demonstrate a qualitative change with age, in which older adults lose the ability to automatize novel tasks, which cannot be attributed merely to generalized cognitive slowing.

Age and method variance in measures of speed and working memory.

Ten measures of speed of processing were administered to 157 individuals, aged 18 to 89 years. The 10 measures comprised five pairs, each of which had a paper-and-pencil and a computer, reaction time (RT) based version of the same measure. Three measures of working memory span were also administered. Two structural equation models were fit to the speed data, one with a single latent variable, speed, and another, nested-factor model in which there were also latent variables for the two methods of measurement. The model with the method latent variables provided a better fit. Age was more strongly related to the method latent variables than to the general speed latent variable. Adding the working memory measures showed that there was also shared variance in those measures beyond the general latent variable, also related to age. The results show that any single measure of speed includes variance due to speed but also to the method of measurement. Use of a latent variable approach to speed is recommended.

Novice motor performance: better not to verbalize.

Offline verbalization about a new motor experience is often assumed to positively influence subsequent performance. Here, we evaluated this presumed positive influence and whether it originates from declarative or from procedural knowledge using the explicit/implicit motor-learning paradigm. To this end, 80 nongolfers learned to perform a golf-putting task with high error rates (i.e., explicit motor learning), and thus relied on declarative knowledge, or low error rates (i.e., implicit motor learning), and thus relied on procedural knowledge. Afterward, they either put their memories of the previous motor experience into words or completed an irrelevant verbal task. Finally, they performed the putting task again. Verbalization did not improve novice motor performance: Putting was impaired, overall, and especially so for high-error learners. We conclude that declarative knowledge is altered by verbalization, whereas procedural knowledge is not.

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.