Diminished State Space Theory of Human Aging.

Many new technologies, such as smartphones, computers, or public-access systems (like ticket-vending machines), are a challenge for older adults. One feature that these technologies have in common is that they involve underlying, partially observable, structures () that determine the actions that are necessary to reach a certain goal (e.g.

Neural evidence for age-related deficits in the representation of state spaces.

Under high cognitive demands, older adults tend to resort to simpler, habitual, or model-free decision strategies. This age-related shift in decision behavior has been attributed to deficits in the representation of the cognitive maps, or state spaces, necessary for more complex model-based decision-making. Yet, the neural mechanisms behind this shift remain unclear.

Resource-rational approach to meta-control problems across the lifespan.

Over the last decade, research on cognitive control and decision-making has revealed that individuals weigh the costs and benefits of engaging in or refraining from control and that whether and how they engage in these cost-benefit analyses may change across development and during healthy aging. In the present article, we examine how lifespan age differences in cognitive abilities affect the meta-control of behavioral strategies across the lifespan and how motivation affects these trade-offs. Based on accumulated evidence, we highlight two hypotheses that may explain the existing results better than current models.

Concurrent Validity of the Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (M-CHAT): Socio-cognitive and Verbal Skills in 18-Month-Old Infants.

The Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (M-CHAT) is a screening questionnaire for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Previous findings have confirmed the M-CHAT's sensitivity and specificity across several cultures, yet few studies have considered M-CHAT scores as a distributed trait in a sample of typical infants. The current study examined how the M-CHAT predicts concurrent word learning (experiment 1) as well as socio-emotional understanding (experiment 2) in 18-month-old infants.

The many routes of mental navigation: contrasting the effects of a detailed and gist retrieval approach on using and forming spatial representations.

Navigated routes can be recalled by remembering a schematic layout or with additional sensory and perceptual details, engaging episodic memory processes. In this study, we contrasted the effects of these remembering approaches on retrieving real-world navigated routes, the impact on flexibly using familiar route information and on learning new spatial representations. In a within-subjects design, participants were oriented to recall familiar routes under two remembering conditions-a detail condition that promoted episodic memory processes and a gist condition in which routes were recalled via schematic processes.