Age-related differences in the evaluation of highly arousing language.

Emotional properties of words can profoundly affect their processing, depending on both the valence (pleasantness) and the degree of arousal (excitation) that the word elicits. Words that are strongly emotionally arousing (such as taboo words) can interfere with subsequent language processing (White & Abrams, 2021). However, little is known about whether or how aging affects the processing of highly arousing language.

Relating Tabooness to Humor and Arousal Ratings in American English: What the F*** Is so Funny?

Emotion can have a profound effect on language processing, and taboo words have been increasingly used in research as highly emotional, negatively valenced stimuli. However, because taboo words as a lexical category are socially constructed and semantically idiosyncratic, they may also have complex emotional characteristics. This complexity may not be fully considered by researchers using taboo words as research stimuli.

Neural Contributions to Reduced Fluid Intelligence across the Adult Lifespan.

Fluid intelligence, the ability to solve novel, complex problems, declines steeply during healthy human aging. Using fMRI, fluid intelligence has been repeatedly associated with activation of a frontoparietal brain network, and impairment following focal damage to these regions suggests that fluid intelligence depends on their integrity. It is therefore possible that age-related functional differences in frontoparietal activity contribute to the reduction in fluid intelligence.

Greater lifestyle engagement is associated with better age-adjusted cognitive abilities.

Previous evidence suggests that modifiable lifestyle factors, such as engagement in leisure activities, might slow the age-related decline of cognitive functions. Less is known, however, about which aspects of lifestyle might be particularly beneficial to healthy cognitive ageing, and whether they are associated with distinct cognitive domains (e.g.

Cognitive Diversity in a Healthy Aging Cohort: Cross-Domain Cognition in the Cam-CAN Project.

Studies of "healthy" cognitive aging often focus on a limited set of measures that decline with age. The current study argues that defining and supporting healthy cognition requires understanding diverse cognitive performance across the lifespan. Data from the Cambridge Centre for Aging and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) cohort was examined across a range of cognitive domains.

Perceptual and conceptual processing of visual objects across the adult lifespan.

Making sense of the external world is vital for multiple domains of cognition, and so it is crucial that object recognition is maintained across the lifespan. We investigated age differences in perceptual and conceptual processing of visual objects in a population-derived sample of 85 healthy adults (24-87 years old) by relating measures of object processing to cognition across the lifespan. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) was recorded during a picture naming task to provide a direct measure of neural activity, that is not confounded by age-related vascular changes.

Strong and specific associations between cardiovascular risk factors and white matter micro- and macrostructure in healthy aging.

Cardiovascular health declines with age, increasing the risk of hypertension and elevated heart rate in middle and old age. Here, we used multivariate techniques to investigate the associations between cardiovascular health (diastolic blood pressure, systolic blood pressure, and heart rate) and white matter macrostructure (lesion volume and number) and microstructure (as measured by diffusion-weighted imaging) in the cross-sectional, population-based Cam-CAN cohort (N = 667, aged 18-88). We found that cardiovascular health and age made approximately similar contributions to white matter health and explained up to 56% of variance therein.

Age-related changes in word retrieval vary by self-reported anxiety but not depression symptoms.

Tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs) are known to increase in frequency across adulthood, but there is wide variability in older adults' TOT rates, suggesting that individual difference factors contribute to TOT incidence. We investigated the role of affect by examining the relationship between self-reported anxiety and depression symptoms and the frequency of TOTs during a laboratory task. Participants were young, middle-aged and older adults in a population-based sample of adults aged 18-87.

Lifestyle activities in mid-life contribute to cognitive reserve in late-life, independent of education, occupation, and late-life activities.

This study tested the hypothesis that mid-life intellectual, physical, and social activities contribute to cognitive reserve (CR). Two hundred five individuals (196 with magnetic resonance imaging) aged 66-88 years from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (www.cam-can.

How are age-related differences in sleep quality associated with health outcomes? An epidemiological investigation in a UK cohort of 2406 adults.

Objectives: To examine age-related differences in self-reported sleep quality and their associations with health outcomes across four domains: physical health, cognitive health, mental health and neural health.

Setting: Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) is a cohort study in East Anglia/England, which collected self-reported health and lifestyle questions as well as a range of objective measures from healthy adults.

Participants: 2406 healthy adults (age 18-98) answered questions about their sleep quality (Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI)) and measures of physical, cognitive, mental and neural health.

Preserved cognitive functions with age are determined by domain-dependent shifts in network responsivity.

Healthy ageing has disparate effects on different cognitive domains. The neural basis of these differences, however, is largely unknown. We investigated this question by using Independent Components Analysis to obtain functional brain components from 98 healthy participants aged 23-87 years from the population-based Cam-CAN cohort.

Age-Related Increases in Verbal Knowledge Are Not Associated With Word Finding Problems in the Cam-CAN Cohort: What You Know Won't Hurt You.

Objective: We tested the claim that age-related increases in knowledge interfere with word retrieval, leading to word finding failures. We did this by relating a measure of crystallized intelligence to tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states and picture naming accuracy.

Method: Participants were from a large (N = 708), cross-sectional (aged 18-88 years), population-based sample from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience cohort (Cam-CAN; www.

Adult Lifespan Cognitive Variability in the Cross-Sectional Cam-CAN Cohort.

This study examines variability across the age span in cognitive performance in a cross-sectional, population-based, adult lifespan cohort from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) study (n = 2680). A key question we highlight is whether using measures that are designed to detect age-related cognitive pathology may not be sensitive to, or reflective of, individual variability among younger adults. We present three issues that contribute to the debate for and against age-related increases in variability.

Proofreading in Young and Older Adults: The Effect of Error Category and Comprehension Difficulty.

Proofreading text relies on stored knowledge, language processing, and attentional resources. Age differentially affects these constituent abilities: while older adults maintain word knowledge and most aspects of language comprehension, language production and attention capacity are impaired with age. Research with young adults demonstrates that proofreading is more attentionally-demanding for contextual errors which require integration across multiple words compared to noncontextual errors which occur within a single word.

The Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) data repository: Structural and functional MRI, MEG, and cognitive data from a cross-sectional adult lifespan sample.

This paper describes the data repository for the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) initial study cohort. The Cam-CAN Stage 2 repository contains multi-modal (MRI, MEG, and cognitive-behavioural) data from a large (approximately N=700), cross-sectional adult lifespan (18-87years old) population-based sample. The study is designed to characterise age-related changes in cognition and brain structure and function, and to uncover the neurocognitive mechanisms that support healthy cognitive ageing.

Idiosyncratic responding during movie-watching predicted by age differences in attentional control.

Much is known about how age affects the brain during tightly controlled, though largely contrived, experiments, but do these effects extrapolate to everyday life? Naturalistic stimuli, such as movies, closely mimic the real world and provide a window onto the brain's ability to respond in a timely and measured fashion to complex, everyday events. Young adults respond to these stimuli in a highly synchronized fashion, but it remains to be seen how age affects neural responsiveness during naturalistic viewing. To this end, we scanned a large (N = 218), population-based sample from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) during movie-watching.

The effect of ageing on fMRI: Correction for the confounding effects of vascular reactivity evaluated by joint fMRI and MEG in 335 adults.

In functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research one is typically interested in neural activity. However, the blood-oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal is a composite of both neural and vascular activity. As factors such as age or medication may alter vascular function, it is essential to account for changes in neurovascular coupling when investigating neurocognitive functioning with fMRI.

The Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) study protocol: a cross-sectional, lifespan, multidisciplinary examination of healthy cognitive ageing.

Background: As greater numbers of us are living longer, it is increasingly important to understand how we can age healthily. Although old age is often stereotyped as a time of declining mental abilities and inflexibility, cognitive neuroscience reveals that older adults use neural and cognitive resources flexibly, recruiting novel neural regions and cognitive processes when necessary. Our aim in this project is to understand how age-related changes to neural structure and function interact to support cognitive abilities across the lifespan.

Language in the aging brain: the network dynamics of cognitive decline and preservation.

Language is a crucial and complex lifelong faculty, underpinned by dynamic interactions within and between specialized brain networks. Whereas normal aging impairs specific aspects of language production, most core language processes are robust to brain aging. We review recent behavioral and neuroimaging evidence showing that language systems remain largely stable across the life span and that both younger and older adults depend on dynamic neural responses to linguistic demands.

Age-related neural reorganization during spoken word recognition: the interaction of form and meaning.

Research on language and aging typically shows that language comprehension is preserved across the life span. Recent neuroimaging results suggest that this good performance is underpinned by age-related neural reorganization [e.g.

White matter changes and word finding failures with increasing age.

Background: Increasing life expectancy necessitates the better understanding of the neurophysiological underpinnings of age-related cognitive changes. The majority of research examining structural-cognitive relationships in aging focuses on the role of age-related changes to grey matter integrity. In the current study, we examined the relationship between age-related changes in white matter and language production.

Orthographic error monitoring in old age: lexical and sublexical availability during perception and production.

Previous research suggests that older adults suffer declines in producing accurate spellings but retain the ability to accurately detect misspellings. The preservation of perception in the face of impaired production has been used to support a model of aging in which age impairs access to linguistic representations under specific circumstances, while representations themselves remain intact. The current research tests two predictions of this Transmission Deficit Hypothesis (TDH): first, that the differential effect of age on perception and production occurs when tasks are equated on response requirements and underlying representations, and second, that both word and spelling frequency interact to determine the effect of age on performance.

Word retrieval failures in old age: the relationship between structure and function.

A common complaint of normal aging is the increase in word-finding failures such as tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs). Behavioral research identifies TOTs as phonological retrieval failures, and recent findings [Shafto, M. A.

Preserving syntactic processing across the adult life span: the modulation of the frontotemporal language system in the context of age-related atrophy.

Although widespread neural atrophy is an inevitable consequence of normal aging, not all cognitive abilities decline as we age. For example, spoken language comprehension tends to be preserved, despite atrophy in neural regions involved in language function. Here, we combined measures of behavior, functional activation, and gray matter (GM) change in a younger (19-34 years) and older group (49-86 years) of participants to identify the mechanisms leading to preserved language comprehension across the adult life span.

Aging and Language Production.

Experimental research and older adults' reports of their own experience suggest that the ability to produce the spoken forms of familiar words declines with aging. Older adults experience more word-finding failures, such as tip-of-the-tongue states, than young adults do, and this and other speech production failures appear to stem from difficulties in retrieving the sounds of words. Recent evidence has identified a parallel age-related decline in retrieving the spelling of familiar words.