Should I keep studying? Consequences of a decision to stop learning in young and older adults.

In situations of cognitive overload, the role of a metacognitive decision to stop learning is of utmost importance. We investigated how young and older adults decide to stop learning as a strategy for maximizing memory performance when they face to-be-learned material exceeding their memory capability. People may decide to stop learning for two main reasons: they experience a growing feeling of disfluency as a learning episode progresses and/or they perceive such a decision to be beneficial for future memory performance.

When awareness gets in the way: Reactivation aversion effects resolve the generality/specificity paradox in sensorimotor interference tasks.

Interference tasks combining different distractor types usually find that between-trial adaptations (congruency sequence effects [CSEs]) do not interact with each other, suggesting that sensorimotor control is domain-specific. However, within each trial, different distractor types often do interact, suggesting that control is domain-general. The present study presents a solution to this apparent paradox.

Sugar rush or sugar crash? A meta-analysis of carbohydrate effects on mood.

The effect of carbohydrate (CHO) consumption on mood is much debated, with researchers reporting both mood improvements and decrements following CHO ingestion. As global consumption of sugar-sweetened products has sharply increased in recent years, examining the validity of claims of an association between CHOs and mood is of high importance. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to evaluate the relationship between acute CHO ingestion and mood.

Heart Rate Variability Predicts Older Adults' Avoidance of Negativity.

Objectives: The ability to produce situation-appropriate cognitive and emotional responses is dependent on autonomic nervous system (ANS) functionality. Heart rate variability (HRV) is an index of ANS functionality, and resting HRV levels have been associated with cognitive control and inhibitory capacity in young adults, particularly when faced with emotional information. As older adults' greater preference for positive and avoidance of negative stimuli (positivity effect) is thought to be dependent on cognitive control, we hypothesized that HRV could predict positivity-effect magnitude in older adults.

Can auditory objects be subitized?

In vision, humans have the ability to mentally "tag" approximately 4 objects, allowing us to monitor, attend, and interact with them. As a consequence, we can rapidly and accurately enumerate up to 4 objects-a process known as subitizing. Here, we investigate whether a similar ability exists for tagging auditory stimuli and find that only 2 or 3 auditory stimuli can be enumerated with high accuracy.

Gain without pain: Glucose promotes cognitive engagement and protects positive affect in older adults.

When faced with a cognitively demanding task, older adults tend to disengage and withdraw effort. At the same time, their usual processing preference for positive information disappears. Providing glucose as an energy resource is known to improve cognitive performance and reinstate older adults' positivity preference.

Effects of time of day on age-related associative deficits.

Time of day is known to influence cognition differently across age groups, with young adults performing better later than earlier in the day and older adults showing the opposite pattern. Thus age-related deficits can be smaller when testing occurs in the morning compared with the afternoon/evening, particularly for tasks requiring executive/controlled/inhibitory processes. Stronger influences of time of day were therefore predicted on associative than on item recognition memory based on their differential requirements for demanding recollective (rather than familiarity) processes.

Aging and syntactic representations: Evidence of preserved syntactic priming and lexical boost.

Young adults can be primed to reuse a syntactic structure across otherwise unrelated utterances but it is not known whether this phenomenon exists in older adults. In a dialogue task, young and older adults described transitive verb target pictures after hearing active or passive sentences. Both groups were more likely to produce a passive sentence following a passive prime than following an active prime (indicating syntactic priming), and this effect increased when the prime and target involved the same verb (indicating lexical boost).

Deficits in category learning in older adults: Rule-based versus clustering accounts.

Memory research has long been one of the key areas of investigation for cognitive aging researchers but only in the last decade or so has categorization been used to understand age differences in cognition. Categorization tasks focus more heavily on the grouping and organization of items in memory, and often on the process of learning relationships through trial and error. Categorization studies allow researchers to more accurately characterize age differences in cognition: whether older adults show declines in the way in which they represent categories with simple rules or declines in representing categories by similarity to past examples.

A signal-detection analysis of eyewitness identification across the adult lifespan.

Middle-aged and older adults are frequently victims and witnesses of crime, but knowledge of how identification performance changes over the adult life span is sparse. The authors asked young (18-30 years), middle-aged (31-59 years), and older (60-95 years) adults (N = 2,670) to watch a video of a mock crime and to attempt to identify the culprit from a fair lineup (in which all of the lineup members matched the appearance of the suspect) or an unfair lineup (in which the suspect stood out). They also asked subjects to provide confidence ratings for their identification decisions.

Food for happy thought: Glucose protects age-related positivity effects under cognitive load.

Older adults show a preference for positive information, which disappears under high task demands. We examined whether glucose can help older adults preserve their positivity effect (PE) under high cognitive load. One hundred twenty-two adults (40 young and 42 older in Experiment 1; 40 older in Experiment 2) consumed a glucose (25 g) or a taste-matched placebo drink and completed an immediate recall task of emotional word-lists presented under high- and low-load conditions.

Look on the bright side: Positivity bias modulates interference effects in the simon task.

Negative faces are detected more quickly but categorized more slowly than positive faces. Using a Simon task, we examined stimulus- and response-related processes of this dissociation: If negative stimuli are both processed and responded to more quickly than positive ones, they should elicit reduced Simon effects. Conversely, if negative stimuli are processed more quickly but responded to more slowly, enlarged Simon effects should occur.

Memory consolidation effects on memory stabilization and item integration in older adults.

This study examined the differential effects of aging on consolidation processes that strengthen newly acquired memory traces in veridical form (memory stabilization) versus consolidation processes that are responsible for integrating these memory traces into an existing body of knowledge (item integration). Older adults learned 13 nonwords and were tested on their memory for the nonwords, and on whether these nonwords impacted upon processing of similar-sounding English words immediately and 24 hours later. Participants accurately recognized the nonwords immediately, but showed significant decreases in delayed recognition and recall.

A benefit of context reinstatement to recognition memory in aging: the role of familiarity processes.

Reinstatement of encoding context facilitates memory for targets in young and older individuals (e.g., a word studied on a particular background scene is more likely to be remembered later if it is presented on the same rather than a different scene or no scene), yet older adults are typically inferior at recalling and recognizing target-context pairings.

Aging and memory as discrimination: Influences of encoding specificity, cue overload, and prior knowledge.

From the perspective of memory-as-discrimination, whether a cue leads to correct retrieval simultaneously depends on the cue's relationship to (a) the memory target and (b) the other retrieval candidates. A corollary of the view is that increasing encoding-retrieval match may only help memory if it improves the cue's capacity to discriminate the target from competitors. Here, age differences in this discrimination process were assessed by manipulating the overlap between cues present at encoding and retrieval orthogonally with cue-target distinctiveness.

Age-related reversal of postural adjustment characteristics during motor imagery.

Physical and imagined movements show similar behavioral constraints and neurophysiological activation patterns. An inhibition mechanism is thought to suppress overt movement during motor imagery, but it does not effectively suppress autonomic or postural adjustments. Inhibitory processes and postural stability both deteriorate with age.

When does prior knowledge disproportionately benefit older adults' memory?

Material consistent with knowledge/experience is generally more memorable than material inconsistent with knowledge/experience - an effect that can be more extreme in older adults. Four experiments investigated knowledge effects on memory with young and older adults. Memory for familiar and unfamiliar proverbs (Experiment 1) and for common and uncommon scenes (Experiment 2) showed similar knowledge effects across age groups.

When Distraction Holds Relevance: A Prospective Memory Benefit for Older Adults.

Evidence is accumulating to show that age-related increases in susceptibility to distracting information can benefit older more than young adults in several cognitive tasks. Here we focus on prospective memory (i.e.

Too easy? The influence of task demands conveyed tacitly on prospective memory.

Previous research suggests that when intentions are encoded, participants establish an attention allocation policy based on their metacognitive beliefs about how demanding it will be to fulfill the prospective memory (PM) task. We investigated whether tacit PM demands can influence judgments about the cognitive effort required for success, and, as a result, affect ongoing task interference and PM performance. Participants performed a lexical decision task in which a PM task of responding to animal words was embedded.

Antimnemonic effects of schemas in young and older adults.

Schema-consistent material that is aligned with an individual's knowledge and experience is typically more memorable than abstract material. This effect is often more extreme in older adults and schema use can alleviate age deficits in memory. In three experiments, young and older adults completed memory tasks where the availability of schematic information was manipulated.

What you know can influence what you are going to know (especially for older adults).

Stimuli related to an individual's knowledge/experience are often more memorable than abstract stimuli, particularly for older adults. This has been found when material that is congruent with knowledge is contrasted with material that is incongruent with knowledge, but there is little research on a possible graded effect of congruency. The present study manipulated the degree of congruency of study material with participants' knowledge.

Mood and cognition in healthy older European adults: the Zenith study.

Background: The study aim was to determine if state and trait intra-individual measures of everyday affect predict cognitive functioning in healthy older community dwelling European adults (n = 387), aged 55-87 years.

Methods: Participants were recruited from centres in France, Italy and Northern Ireland. Trait level and variability in positive and negative affect (PA and NA) were assessed using self-administered PANAS scales, four times a day for four days.

Is it relevant? Influence of trial manipulations of prospective memory context on task interference.

Prospective memory (PM) research has often investigated if having an intention interferes with ongoing activities, but rarely by linking the intention to a particular context. We examined effects of trial-by-trial changes in whether the context (defined by colour) was relevant for the nonfocal PM task. The ongoing task involved speeded decisions about the position (left/right) of the upper-case letter in a pair, and the PM task consisted of pressing an additional key if the upper-case and lower-case letters were in a specified colour and the same letter.

Target context specification can reduce costs in nonfocal prospective memory.

Performing a nonfocal prospective memory (PM) task results in a cost to ongoing task processing, but the precise nature of the monitoring processes involved remains unclear. We investigated whether target context specification (i.e.