The capacity of visual-spatial working memory (WM) declines from early to late adulthood. Recent attempts at identifying neural correlates of WM capacity decline have focused on the maintenance phase of WM. Here, we investigate neural mechanisms during the encoding phase as another potential mechanism contributing to adult age differences in WM capacity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMuch is known about reactive mood changes due to unpleasant tasks or situations. This research provides evidence that recurring events may also elicit anticipatory mood changes, and that both reactive and anticipatory mood responses need to be considered when studying affective experiences and emotion regulation. Based on prevalent theories on emotion regulation, we propose that anticipatory and reactive mood responses to recurring unpleasant events may change throughout adulthood, reflecting an age-related shift in emotion-regulation priorities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEmerging evidence from animal studies suggests that suboptimal dopamine (DA) modulation may be associated with increased forgetting of episodic information. Extending these observations, we investigated the influence of DA-relevant genes on forgetting in samples of younger (n = 433, 20-31 years) and older (n = 690, 59-71 years) adults. The effects of single nucleotide polymorphisms of the DA D2 (DRD2) and D3 (DRD3) receptor genes as well as the DA transporter gene (DAT1; SLC6A3) were examined.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMortality-related processes are known to modulate late-life change in cognitive abilities, but it is an open question whether and how precipitous declines with impending death generalize to other domains of functioning. We investigated this notion by using 13-year longitudinal data from now-deceased participants in the Berlin Aging Study (N = 439; 70-103 years at first occasion; M = 87 years). Using time metrics of chronological age and time-to-death, we compared changes in key indicators of cognitive, sensory, physical, health, social, and self-related domains.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBased on a two-component model of episodic memory development across the lifespan, we examined the contribution of memory monitoring and binding processes to older adults' increased susceptibility to false memories with high subjective confidence. Younger and older adults worked on a modified version of the continuous recognition task (Schnider, von Daniken, & Gutbrod, 1996). Participants saw the same set of unrelated word pairs in three subsequent runs and had to identify pairs that were repeated within runs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBased on a 2-component framework of episodic memory development across the lifespan (Shing & Lindenberger, 2011), we examined the contribution of memory-related binding and monitoring processes to false memory susceptibility in childhood and old age. We administered a repeated continuous recognition task to children (N = 20, 10-12 years), younger adults (N = 20, 20-27 years), and older adults (N = 21, 68-76 years). Participants saw the same set of unrelated word pairs in 3 consecutive runs and their task was to identify pair reoccurrences within runs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMultitalker situations confront listeners with a plethora of competing auditory inputs, and hence require selective attention to relevant information, especially when the perceptual saliency of distracting inputs is high. This study augmented the classical forced-attention dichotic listening paradigm by adding an interaural intensity manipulation to investigate developmental differences in the interplay between perceptual saliency and attentional control during auditory processing between early and middle childhood. We found that older children were able to flexibly focus on instructed auditory inputs from either the right or the left ear, overcoming the effects of perceptual saliency.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStable walking depends on the coordination of multiple biomechanical degrees of freedom to ensure the dynamic maintenance of whole-body equilibrium as well as continuous forward progression. We investigated adult age-related differences in whole-body coordination underlying stabilization of center of mass (CoM) position and step pattern during locomotion. Sixteen younger (20-30 years) and 16 healthy older men (65-80 years) walked on a motorized treadmill at 80%, 100% and 120% of their self-selected preferred speed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Hum Neurosci
December 2012
To further test and explore the hypothesis that synchronous oscillatory brain activity supports interpersonally coordinated behavior during dyadic music performance, we simultaneously recorded the electroencephalogram (EEG) from the brains of each of 12 guitar duets repeatedly playing a modified Rondo in two voices by C.G. Scheidler.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe reliability, stability, and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of event-related potentials (ERPs) were investigated in children, adolescents, younger adults, and older adults in performance monitoring tasks. P2, N2, P3, and P2-N2 peak-to-peak amplitude showed high odd-even split reliabilities in all age groups, ranging from.70 to.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStringed instrument bowing is a complex sensorimotor skill, involving fine regulation of bow orientation and motion relative to the string. In this study, we characterize this skill in terms of stabilization of specific bow parameters as well as the underlying use and coordination of the degrees of freedom (DOF) of the right bowing arm. Age-matched samples of 10 advanced cellists and 10 cello novices took part in the study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn addition to sensory decline, age-related losses in auditory perception also reflect impairments in attentional modulation of perceptual saliency. Using an attention and intensity-modulated dichotic listening paradigm, we investigated electrophysiological correlates of processing conflicts between attentional focus and perceptual saliency in 25 younger and 26 older adults. Participants were instructed to attend to the right or left ear, and perceptual saliency was manipulated by varying the intensities of both ears.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDeclines in selective attention are one of the sources contributing to age-related impairments in a broad range of cognitive functions. Most previous research on mechanisms underlying older adults' selection deficits has studied the deployment of visual attention to static objects and features. Here we investigate neural correlates of age-related differences in spatial attention to multiple objects as they move.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLittle is known about the neural correlates of within-person variability in cognitive performance. We investigated associations between regional brain volumes and trial-to-trial, block-to-block, and day-to-day variability in choice-reaction time, and episodic and working memory accuracy. Healthy younger (n=25) and older (n=18) adults underwent 101 daily assessments of cognitive performance, and their regional brain volumes were measured manually on magnetic resonance images.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the behavioral and social sciences, structural equation models (SEMs) have become widely accepted as a modeling tool for the relation between latent and observed variables. SEMs can be seen as a unification of several multivariate analysis techniques. SEM Trees combine the strengths of SEMs and the decision tree paradigm by building tree structures that separate a data set recursively into subsets with significantly different parameter estimates in a SEM.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) rs429358 (ε4) and rs7412 (ε2), both invoking changes in the amino-acid sequence of the apolipoprotein E (APOE) gene, have previously been tested for association with multiple sclerosis (MS) risk. However, none of these studies was sufficiently powered to detect modest effect sizes at acceptable type-I error rates. As both SNPs are only imperfectly captured on commonly used microarray genotyping platforms, their evaluation in the context of genome-wide association studies has been hindered until recently.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAging compromises dopamine transporter (DAT) and receptor mechanisms in the frontostriatal circuitry. In a sample of 1288 younger and older adults, we investigated (i) whether individual differences in genotypes of the DAT gene (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe variability of health complaints within individuals across time has rarely been studied, and the question whether between- and within-person factor structures of health-related variables are equivalent has not been tested so far. We examined self-reported health complaints in 101 younger (20-31 years) and 103 older adults (65-80 years) over a period of 100 daily assessments. Data were analyzed with confirmatory two-level factor analysis.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeurosci Biobehav Rev
October 2012
We suggest that working memory (WM) performance can be conceptualized as the interplay of low-level feature binding processes and top-down control, relating to posterior and frontal brain regions and their interaction in a distributed neural network. We propose that due to age-differential trajectories of posterior and frontal brain regions top-down control processes are not fully mature until young adulthood and show marked decline with advancing age, whereas binding processes are relatively mature in children, but show senescent decline in older adults. A review of the literature spanning from middle childhood to old age shows that binding and top-down control processes undergo profound changes across the lifespan.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFElectroencephalographic recordings (EEG) were used to assess age-associated differences in nonlinear brain dynamics during both rest and auditory oddball performance in children aged 9.0-12.8 years, younger adults, and older adults.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe recently introduced a two-component model of the mechanisms underlying age differences in memory functioning across the lifespan. According to this model, memory performance is based on associative and strategic components. The associative component is relatively mature by middle childhood, whereas the strategic component shows a maturational lag and continues to develop until young adulthood.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study investigated the extent to which older adults' associative memory functioning can be modified through instruction and practice based on individuals' memory status. Here 42 younger adults and 42 older adults performed four tasks that measured strategic and binding aspects of memory. With latent class analysis, two classes of older adults were identified.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDo individuals with higher levels of task-relevant cognitive resources gain more from training, or do they gain less? For episodic memory, empirical evidence is mixed. Here, we revisit this issue by applying structural equation models for capturing individual differences in change to data from 108 participants aged 9-12, 20-25, and 65-78 years. Participants learned and practiced an imagery-based mnemonic to encode and retrieve words by location cues.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychol Aging
September 2012
Computational models of cognitive aging propose that age-related decrements in cognitive performance, including short-term memory (STM), result from less distinct stimulus representations. When applied to visual STM, these models predict higher discriminal dispersion (L. L.
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