Enhancing creative divergent thinking in older adults with a semantic retrieval strategy.

Creative divergent thinking involves the generation of unique ideas by pulling from semantic memory stores and exercising cognitive flexibility to shape these memories into something new. Although cognitive abilities decline with age, semantic memory tends to remain intact. This study aims to utilize that memory to investigate the effectiveness of a brief cognitive training to improve creative divergent thinking.

Memory and creativity: A meta-analytic examination of the relationship between memory systems and creative cognition.

Increasing evidence suggests that specific memory systems (e.g., semantic vs.

Ultra-brief Assessment of Working Memory Capacity: Ambulatory Assessment Study Using Smartphones.

Background: The development of mobile technology with substantial computing power (ie, smartphones) has enabled the adaptation of performance-based cognitive assessments to remote administration and novel intensive longitudinal study designs (eg, measurement burst designs). Although an "ambulatory" cognitive assessment paradigm may provide new research opportunities, the adaptation of conventional measures to a mobile format conducive to intensive repeated measurement involves balancing measurement precision, administration time, and procedural consistency.

Objective: Across 3 studies, we adapted "complex span" tests of working memory capacity (WMC) for ultra-brief, smartphone-based administration and examined their reliability, sufficiency, and associations with full-length, laboratory-based computerized administrations.

Understanding associative false memories in aging using multivariate analyses.

Age-related declines in associative memory are ubiquitous, with decreases in behavioral discriminability largely arising from increases in false memories for recombined lures. Using representational similarity analyses to examine the neural basis of associative false memories in aging, the current study found that neural pattern similarity between Hits and FAs and Hits and CRs differed as a function of age in occipital ROIs, such that older adults exhibited a smaller difference between the two similarity metrics than did younger adults. Additionally, greater Hit-FA representational similarity correlated with increases in associative FAs across several ROIs.

Examining the Neural Basis of Congruent and Incongruent Configural Contexts during Associative Retrieval.

Disrupting the configural context, or relative organization and orientation of paired stimuli, between encoding and retrieval negatively impacts memory. Using univariate and multivariate fMRI analyses, we examined the effect of retaining and manipulating the configural context on neural mechanisms supporting associative retrieval. Behavioral results showed participants had significantly higher hit rates for recollecting pairs in a contextually congruent, versus incongruent, configuration.

Shared neural recruitment across working memory and motor control tasks as a function of task difficulty and age.

Past research suggests that working memory (WM) and motor control may engage similar cognitive and neural mechanisms in older adults, particularly when task difficulty increases. However, much of this evidence arises from comparisons across behavioral and imaging studies that test only one of the foregoing functional domains. The current study used fMRI within the same group of older adults to investigate whether WM and motor control recruit common mechanisms, and whether recruitment increased with task demand and age.

Different types of associative encoding evoke differential processing in both younger and older adults: Evidence from univariate and multivariate analyses.

Age-related deficits in associative processing are well-documented (e.g., Naveh-Benjamin, 2000) and have been assumed to be the result of a general deficit that affects all types of binding.