The retrogenesis of age-related decline in declarative and procedural memory.

The retrogenesis hypothesis proposes that the order of breakdown of cognitive abilities in older adults is the reverse of the developmental order of children. Declarative and procedural memory systems, however, have been empirically understudied regarding this issue. The current study aimed to investigate whether retrogenesis occurs in the developmental and decline order of the declarative and procedural memory systems.

Categorical Perception of Lexical Tones in Mandarin-Speaking Seniors.

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the different degeneration processes of categorical perception (CP) of Mandarin lexical tones in the normal aging population and the pathological aging population with mild cognitive impairment (MCI).

Method: In Experiment I, we compared the identification and discrimination of Tone 1 and Tone 2 across young adults, seniors aged 60-65 years, and older seniors aged 75-80 years with normal cognitive abilities. In Experiment II, we compared lexical tone identification and discrimination across young adults, healthy seniors, and age-matched seniors with MCI.

Foreign Language Learning in Older Adults: Anatomical and Cognitive Markers of Vocabulary Learning Success.

In recent years, foreign language learning (FLL) has been proposed as a possible cognitive intervention for older adults. However, the brain network and cognitive functions underlying FLL has remained largely unconfirmed in older adults. In particular, older and younger adults have markedly different cognitive profile-while older adults tend to exhibit decline in most cognitive domains, their semantic memory usually remains intact.

Can inhibition deficit hypothesis account for age-related differences in semantic fluency? Converging evidence from Stroop color and word test and an ERP flanker task.

The inhibition deficit hypothesis (IDH) proposed that individual differences in inhibitory control is an underlying reason for age-related language decline. This study examined whether the hypothesis holds within the domain of lexico-semantic retrieval. Sixty-six older adults aged 60-79 were tested in a semantic fluency task comprising 16 categories; each response was classified as automatic or controlled.

The effect of Mandarin listeners' musical and pitch aptitude on perceptual learning of Cantonese level-tones.

Contrary to studies on speech learning of consonants and vowels, the issue of individual variability is less well understood in the learning of lexical tones. Whereas existing studies have focused on contour-tone learning (Mandarin) by listeners without experience of a tonal language, this study addressed a research gap by investigating the perceptual learning of level-tone contrasts (Cantonese) by learners with experience of a contour-tone system (Mandarin). Critically, we sought to answer the question of how Mandarin listeners' initial perception and learning of Cantonese level-tones are affected by their musical and pitch aptitude.

Which cognitive functions subserve clustering and switching in category fluency? Generalisations from an extended set of semantic categories using linear mixed-effects modelling.

Clustering and switching are hypothesised to reflect the automatic and controlled components in category fluency, respectively, but how they are associated with cognitive functions has not been fully elucidated, due to several uncertainties. (1) The conventional scoring method that segregates responses by semantic categories could not optimally dissociate the automatic and controlled components. (2) The temporal structure of individual responses, as characterised by mean retrieval time (MRT) and mean switching time (MST), has seldom been analysed alongside the more well-studied variables, cluster size (CS) and number of switches (NS).

Conflict monitoring in multi-sensory flanker tasks: Effects of cross-modal distractors on the N2 component.

The N2 component is a well-known neural correlate of conflict monitoring (CM), being more negative in the presence of conflicting information in visual conflict tasks. However, whether to-be-ignored auditory distractors can introduce additional conflict remains unknown. In the present work, subjects performed a visual (V) and audiovisual (AV) version of a Go/NoGo flanker task, and responded only if the target arrow pointed toward a pre-specified direction (e.