Age differences in context use during reading and downstream effects on recognition memory.

It is well-known that sentential context modulates sentence processing. But does context also have effects that extend beyond the immediate moment, for example, by impacting the memory representations that people store? And are there age-related differences in this process? Here, we investigated this question. German readers who varied in age self-paced through constraining sentences that continued in a predictable or less predictable fashion.

Modern scores for traditional tests - Review of the diagnostic potential of scores derived from word list learning tests in mild cognitive impairment and early Alzheimer's Disease.

Episodic memory impairment is one of the early hallmarks in Alzheimer's Disease. In the clinical diagnosis and research, episodic memory impairment is typically assessed using word lists that are repeatedly presented to and recalled by the participant across several trials. Until recently, total learning scores, which consist of the total number of words that are recalled by participants, were almost exclusively used for diagnostic purposes.

Not so different after all? An event-related potential study on item and source memory for object-scene pairs in German and Chinese young adults.

In recent years, several cross-cultural studies reported that Westerners focus more on central aspects of a scene (e.g., an object) relative to peripheral aspects (e.

Even young children make multiple predictions in the complex visual world.

Children can anticipate upcoming input in sentences with semantically constraining verbs. In the visual world, the sentence context is used to anticipatorily fixate the only object matching potential sentence continuations. Adults can process even multiple visual objects in parallel when predicting language.

ORCA: A picture database of object-scene arrangements for cross-cultural and aging research.

In recent years, cross-cultural research on the modulation of basic cognitive processes by culture has intensified - also from an aging perspective. Despite this increased research interest, only a few cross-culturally normed non-verbal stimulus sets are available to support cross-cultural cognitive research in younger and older adults. Here we present the ORCA (Official Rating of Complex Arrangements) picture database, which includes a total of 720 object-scene compositions sorted into 180 quadruples (e.

Rational speech comprehension: Interaction between predictability, acoustic signal, and noise.

Introduction: During speech comprehension, multiple sources of information are available to listeners, which are combined to guide the recognition process. Models of speech comprehension posit that when the acoustic speech signal is obscured, listeners rely more on information from other sources. However, these models take into account only word frequency information and local contexts (surrounding syllables), but not sentence-level information.

A Combined Intervention of Aerobic Exercise and Video Game in Older Adults: The Efficacy and Neural Basis on Improving Mnemonic Discrimination.

Background: Mnemonic discrimination is very vulnerable to aging. Previous studies have reported that aerobic exercise and enriched cognitive stimulation (e.g.

Explore with Me: Peer Observation Decreases Risk-Taking but Increases Exploration Tendencies across Adolescence.

It has been assumed that adolescents increase risk-taking tendencies when peers are present but findings on experimental decision-making have been inconclusive. Most studies focus on risk-taking tendencies, ignoring the effects peer presence can exert over other cognitive processes involved in decision-making, as well as any other underlying developmental and individual differences. In the present study, the trial-by-trial choice behavior was analyzed in a task in which adolescents adjust to dynamically changing risk probabilities.

Ratings of name agreement and semantic categorization of 247 colored clipart pictures by young German children.

Developmental and longitudinal studies with children increasingly use pictorial stimuli in cognitive, psychologic, and psycholinguistic research. To enhance validity and comparability within and across those studies, the use of normed pictures is recommended. Besides, creating picture sets and evaluating them in rating studies is very time consuming, in particular regarding samples of young children in which testing time is rather limited.

Age-related differences in expectation-based novel word learning.

Adult language users can infer the meaning of a previously unfamiliar word from a single exposure to this word in a semantically and thematically constrained context, henceforth, predictive context (Borovsky et al., 2010 Cognition, 116(2), 289-296; Borovsky et al., 2012 Language Learning and Development, 8(3), 278-302).

Developmental differences in processing the valence and magnitude of incentive cues: Mid-adolescents are more sensitive to potential gains than early- or late-adolescents.

Recent research has focused on the interaction between motivation and cognitive control and shown that both are important for goal-directed behavior. There also is evidence for developmental differences in the sensitivity and behavioral effectiveness of incentives, showing that mid-adolescents might be especially susceptible to rewards. Further pursuing this line of research, the present study examined developmental differences in incentive processing and whether these potential differences also would correspond to changes in cognitive control.

Semantic Predictability Facilitates Comprehension of Degraded Speech in a Graded Manner.

Previous studies have shown that at moderate levels of spectral degradation, semantic predictability facilitates language comprehension. It is argued that when speech is degraded, listeners have about the sentence endings; i.e.

Mishearing as a Side Effect of Rational Language Comprehension in Noise.

Language comprehension in noise can sometimes lead to mishearing, due to the noise disrupting the speech signal. Some of the difficulties in dealing with the noisy signal can be alleviated by drawing on the context - indeed, top-down predictability has shown to facilitate speech comprehension in noise. Previous studies have furthermore shown that strong reliance on the top-down predictions can lead to increased rates of mishearing, especially in older adults, which are attributed to general deficits in cognitive control in older adults.

Patients with amnestic MCI Fail to Adapt Executive Control When Repeatedly Tested with Semantic Verbal Fluency Tasks.

Objective: Semantic verbal fluency (SVF) tasks require individuals to name items from a specified category within a fixed time. An impaired SVF performance is well documented in patients with amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (aMCI). The two leading theoretical views suggest either loss of semantic knowledge or impaired executive control to be responsible.

Age differences in decision making under known risk: The role of working memory and impulsivity.

This study examined whether age differences in risky decision making are dependent on known probability and value of outcomes (i.e., the expected value [EV]), the valence of anticipated outcomes (gains or losses), and individual differences in working memory and impulsivity.

Training and Transfer of Cue Updating in Older Adults Is Limited: Evidence From Behavioral and Neuronal Data.

Cognitive control processes, such as updating task-relevant information while switching between multiple tasks, are substantially impaired in older adults. However, it has also been shown that these cognitive control processes can be improved by training interventions, e.g.

The interplay between cognitive control and emotional processing in children and adolescents.

This study examined interactions between cognitive control and emotional processing throughout adolescent development. In particular, we investigated whether age differences in response inhibition and initiation were influenced by an emotional expression of faces and whether the effects differed from processing of nonemotional features of faces. Therefore, we applied two versions of a Go/No-go task, an emotional task requiring responding or withholding responding to happy and angry faces, and a gender task including decisions to female and male faces in a large sample (N = 187, age range = 9-18 years).

Plasticity in brain activity dynamics after task-shifting training in older adults.

Cognitive control is supported by a dynamic interplay of transient (i.e., trial-related) brain activation across fronto-parietal networks and sustained (i.

Spatio-Temporal Neural Changes After Task-Switching Training in Old Age.

In the present study, we aimed at examining selective neural changes after task-switching training in old age by not only considering the spatial location but also the timescale of brain activation changes (i.e., sustained/block-related or transient/trial-related timescales).

Are Mid-Adolescents Prone to Risky Decisions? The Influence of Task Setting and Individual Differences in Temperament.

Recent developmental models assume a higher tendency to take risks in mid-adolescence, while the empirical evidence for this assumption is rather mixed. Most of the studies applied quite different tasks to measure risk-taking behavior and used a narrow age range. The main goal of the present study was to examine risk-taking behavior in four task settings, the Treasure Hunting Task (THT) in a gain and a loss domain, the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), and the STOPLIGHT task.

Exploitation vs. exploration-computational temporal and semantic analysis explains semantic verbal fluency impairment in Alzheimer's disease.

Impaired Semantic Verbal Fluency (SVF) in dementia due to Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and its precursor Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is well known. Yet, it remains open whether this impairment mirrors the breakdown of semantic memory retrieval processes or executive control processes. Therefore, qualitative analysis of the SVF has been proposed but is limited in terms of methodology and feasibility in clinical practice.

Effects of Aging and Dual-Task Demands on the Comprehension of Less Expected Sentence Continuations: Evidence From Pupillometry.

Prior studies on language processing in aging have shown that older adults experience integration difficulties for contextually unpredictable target words (as indicated by low cloze probabilities in prior ratings), and that such comprehension difficulties are more likely to occur under more demanding processing conditions (e.g., dual-task situations).

The Index of Cognitive Activity as a Measure of Cognitive Processing Load in Dual Task Settings.

Increases in pupil size have long been used as an indicator of cognitive load. Recently, the Index of Cognitive Activity (ICA), a novel pupillometric measure has received increased attention. The ICA measures the frequency of rapid pupil dilations, and is an interesting complementary measure to overall pupil size because it disentangles the pupil response to cognitive activity from effects of light input.

Surprisal modulates dual-task performance in older adults: Pupillometry shows age-related trade-offs in task performance and time-course of language processing.

Even though older adults are known to have difficulty at language processing when a secondary task has to be performed simultaneously, few studies have addressed how older adults process language in dual-task demands when linguistic load is systematically varied. Here, we manipulated surprisal, an information theoretic measure that quantifies the amount of new information conveyed by a word, to investigate how linguistic load affects younger and older adults during early and late stages of sentence processing under conditions when attention is split between two tasks. In high-surprisal sentences, target words were implausible and mismatched with semantic expectancies based on context, thereby causing integration difficulty.

Impairments in resource allocation and executive control in children with ADHD.

Children diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) show pronounced alterations in cognitive tasks, such as a highly variable mode of responding. There is an ongoing debate about the key driving mechanisms of such alterations (e.g.