Experienced and remembered emotional intensity in older adults.

After Ross Perot's abrupt withdrawal from the presidential race in July of 1992, supporters (n?=?227) rated their initial emotional reactions and described their coping strategies. After the elections in November of 1992, supporters (n?=?147) recalled their initial emotional reactions. In contrast to claims that subjective emotional intensity decreases with age, older adults (71–84 years, M?=?75) initially reported feeling just as sad, angry, and hopeful as middle-aged (46–70 years, M?=?60) and younger adults (22–45 years, M?=?37). Older adults were more likely than middle-aged and younger adults to disengage from thwarted political goals, however. For those who maintained their original goal, memory for the intensity of past feelings of sadness decreased with age. These findings suggest that age differences in response to survey questions about emotional intensity may reflect changes in memory for past emotions, and changes in coping strategies, rather than the intensity of the older adults' emotional experience as it occurred. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Short-term memory for serial order in schizophrenia: A detailed examination of error types.

Cognitive deficits in schizophrenia have been associated with working memory problems. Schizophrenic patients (n?=?24) and controls (n?=?29) participated in simple short-term memory tasks, recalling a list of letters from the first to last item in the order of presentation. The authors hypothesized that deficient sequential representations would increase movement errors (e.g., ABCD being recalled as ABDC) or intrusion errors (e.g., ABCD being recalled as ABCX), whereas simple trace decay would lead to omission errors (e.g., ABCD being recalled as ABC_). Patients made disproportionately more omissions toward the end of 6-item lists. There were no group differences in movements or intrusions as a function of serial position. Schizophrenic patients' limited short-term memory span may be due to greater forgetting during recall and not to a selective deficit in the mechanisms responsible for maintaining serial order information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Glucose effects on cognition in adults with Down's syndrome.

Glucose enhances memory in a variety of individuals, including people with Alzheimer's disease. By 35 years of age, adults with Down's syndrome (DS) develop the characteristic plaques and tangles found in Alzheimer's disease, despite findings indicating that not all older DS individuals meet criteria for dementia. To examine the possibility that glucose enhances memory in adults with DS (mean age?=?35 years, range?=?19–55 years), adults with DS were given a battery of tests specifically designed for individuals with DS in glucose and control conditions. No participant met criteria for dementia, regardless of age. Glucose enhanced performance on tests requiring both long-term memory and auditory processing. In addition, increased age was associated with poorer performance on the majority of tests in the control condition, indicating that cognitive decline with aging may be more prevalent in DS than previously believed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sequencing, Speech Production, and Selective Effects of Aging on Phonological and Morphological Speech Errors.

To test age-linked predictions of node structure theory (NST) and other theories, young and older adults performed a task that elicited large numbers of phonological and morphological speech errors. Stimuli were visually presented words containing either /p/ or /b/, and participants changed the /p/ to /b/ or vice versa and produced the resulting word as quickly as possible. For example, the correct response was "bunk" for the stimulus PUNK, and "ripped" for RIBBED. Consistent with NST predictions, the elicited speech errors exhibited selective effects of aging. Some error types decreased with aging. For example, young adults produced more nonsequential substitution errors (as a percentage of total errors) than older adults (e.g., intended bills misproduced as "gills"). However, other error types remained constant or increased with aging. For example, older adults produced more omission errors than young adults, especially omissions involving inflectional endings (e.g.. intended ripped misproduced as "np"). In addition, older adults exhibited special difficulties with 2 types of phonological and morphological sequencing processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age and working memory: The role of perceptual speed, the central executive, and the phonological loop.

In a study (N?=?61) comparing older (age range?=?60–80 years, M?=?67) and younger (age range?=?20-33 years, M?=?25) people, age deficits were observed in working memory, perceptual speed, and central executive functioning but not in phonological loop functioning. Controlling for age differences in central executive performance removed over 50% of the age-related variance in working memory span. However, controlling for perceptual speed removed all of the age-related variance in working memory span. In addition, age differences in central executive functioning were largely eliminated after controlling for age deficits in perceptual speed. These findings suggest that age differences in central executive functioning are primarily attributable to a general slowdown in the rate at which information is activated within the working memory system and that no specific deficits in the central executive occur as a consequence of aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age-related decrement in auditory selective attention.

Young (n?=?30), middle-aged (n?=?32), and old (n?=?28) adults repeated (shadowed) words presented to the left ear at 60 words per minute with and without distracter words presented to the other ear. Dichotic shadowing error rate increased with age. An attempt to eliminate the age effect by adjusting for age differences in monaural shadowing errors, fluid intelligence, and pure-tone hearing loss did not succeed. When the analyses were confined to Ss who made no monaural shadowing errors, dichotic shadowing errors still increased linearly with age. These results showed that there are selective-attention deficits in older adults that cannot be accounted for by the uncertainty of the target location. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and emotional memory: Cognitive mechanisms underlying the positivity effect.

Younger adults tend to remember negative information better than positive or neutral information (negativity bias). The negativity bias is reduced in aging, with older adults occasionally exhibiting superior memory for positive, as opposed to negative or neutral, information (positivity bias). Two experiments with younger (N = 24 in Experiment 1, N = 25 in Experiment 2; age range: 18?35 years) and older adults (N = 24 in both experiments; age range: 60?85 years) investigated the cognitive mechanisms responsible for age-related differences in recognition memory for emotional information. Results from diffusion model analyses (R. Ratcliff, 1978) indicated that the effects of valence on response bias were similar in both age groups but that Age × Valence interactions emerged in memory retrieval. Specifically, older adults experienced greater overall familiarity for positive items than younger adults. We interpret this finding in terms of an age-related increase in the accessibility of positive information in long-term memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age and forgetting rate with pictorial stimuli.

The rate of forgetting standardized line drawings of common objects was assessed in groups of young (M age?=?22 years) and older (M age?=?70.5 years) subjects. The two groups forgot equal quantities of pictorial stimuli over successive intervals of 10 min, 2 hr, and 48 hr, after being matched for original learning. In contrast, the older subjects showed the expected age decrement in reproduction of geometric designs from memory. These findings indicate that aging does not affect retention of pictures when differences in learning and retrieval abilities are controlled. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age trends for failures of sustained attention.

Recent research has revealed an age-related reduction in errors in a sustained attention task, suggesting that sustained attention abilities improve with age. Such results seem paradoxical in light of the well-documented age-related declines in cognitive performance. In the present study, performance on the sustained attention to response task (SART) was assessed in a supplemented archival sample of 638 individuals between 14 and 77 years old. SART errors and response speed appeared to decline in a linear fashion as a function of age throughout the age span studied. In contrast, other measures of sustained attention (reaction time coefficient of variation), anticipation, and omissions) showed a decrease early in life and then remained unchanged for the rest of the life span. Thus, sustained attention shows improvements with maturation in early adulthood but then does not change with aging in older adults. On the other hand, aging across the entire life span leads to a more strategic (i.e., slower) response style that reduces the overt and critical consequences (i.e., SART errors) of momentary task disengagement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age differences in target identification as a function of retinal location and noise level: Examination of the useful field of view.

Foveal and peripheral target detection were compared in young adults (M age?=?22 years) and older adults (M age?=?66 years) who were optically corrected for the viewing distance. In a two-alternative, forced-choice task, target letters were presented at 0° to 10.5° from fixation. Targets were presented alone, flanked on each side by one noise element (i.e., nontarget letter), or embedded in a horizontal row of 19 noise elements. An Age?×?Noise Level?×?Eccentricity interaction was obtained, wherein age differences were largest for peripheral targets presented in noise. Slope analyses of latency data showed that the performance of young adults in the high-noise condition was most similar to that of older adults in the low-noise condition. At the functional level, results indicated that aging is associated with a restricted useful field of view. In addition, the data suggest that age differences in search can be described by a model in which older adults take smaller perceptual samples from the visual scene and scan these samples more slowly than do the young adults. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Episodic memory functioning in a community-based sample of old adults with major depression: Utilization of cognitive support.

Community-based samples of old adults with current major depression (n?=?17; mean age 83.29 yrs) and healthy old adults (n?=?51; mean age 83.29 yrs) were examined on a variety of episodic recall and recognition tasks. Results indicate depression-related deficits in recall that were reduced but not eliminated, in recognition. Control Ss were able to utilize cognitive support in the form of more study time and item organizability in free recall, whereas depressed Ss were not. However, both groups showed equal gains from the provision of category cues and beneficial effects of prior knowledge and more study time in recognition. Results suggest that depression results in deficits in effortful, elaborate processes at encoding and retrieval and that old age depression is associated with a reduced ability to utilize cognitive support to improve episodic memory. Depressed older adults appear to require cognitive support at both encoding and retrieval to demonstrate memory facilitation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Episodic priming and memory for temporal source: Event-related potentials reveal age-related differences in prefrontal functioning.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from young (M?=?25) and older (M?=?71) adults during a recognition memory paradigm that assessed episodic priming. Participants studied two temporally distinct lists of sentences (each with two unassociated nouns). At test, in response to the nouns, participants made old–new, followed by remember (context)–know (familiarity) and source (i.e., list) judgments. Both young and older adults showed equivalent episodic priming effects. However, compared to the young adults, the older adults showed a greater source performance decrement than item memory performance decrement. Both age groups showed equivalent posterior-maximal old-new ERP effects. However, only the young produced a frontal-maximal, late onset old-new effect that differed as a function of subsequent list attribution. Because source memory is thought to be mediated by prefrontal cortex, we conclude that age-related memory differences may be due to a deficit in a prefrontal cortical system that underlies source memory and are not likely to be due to an age-related decline in episodic priming. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and the Ranschburg effect: No evidence of reduced response suppression in old age.

Two experiments tested 1 aspect of L. Hasher and R. T. Zacks's (1988) reduced inhibition hypothesis, namely, that old age impairs the ability to suppress information in working memory that is no longer relevant. In Experiment 1, young and older adults were asked to recall lists of letters in the correct order. Half of the lists contained repeated items while half were control lists. Recall of nonadjacent repeated items was worse than that of control items. This Ranschburg effect was larger (i.e., greater response suppression) in older than in young adults. In Experiment 2, young and older adults were required either to recall the list or to report if there was a repeated item. Repetition detection was high and similar in the 2 age groups. When age differences in overall performance were taken into account, there was evidence of increased repetition inhibition with age in both experiments. Thus, contrary to the general reduced inhibition hypothesis, the specific process of response suppression during serial recall is not reduced by aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An opposition procedure for detecting age-related deficits in recollection: Telling effects of repetition.

In 2 experiments, the advantages of placing automatic and consciously controlled memory processes in opposition to study age-related declines in memory performance were examined. Drawing on the common memory failure of mistakenly repeating oneself, a task was designed in which participants had to rely on conscious memory (recollection) to avoid repetition errors. Recollection proved to be severely affected by aging; older adults showed significantly more repetition errors than did younger adults, even at very short retention intervals. These results contrast sharply with the small age differences found with a standard recognition test. Moreover, L. L. Jacoby's (1991) process-dissociation procedure (Experiment 2) showed that automatic memory processes were unaffected with age and could support recognition performance in older adults. The advantages of the opposition procedure for studying memory in older adults relative to other measures are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Use of relational and item-specific information in remembering by older and younger adults.

The applicability to older adults of predictions from the integrated memory model, that optimal memory results from concurrent availability of relational and item-specific information, was assessed. In Experiment 1, older adults (M?=?69 years) encoded related or unrelated words using rating, sorting, or both tasks. Using both tasks produced better recall than either separate task. Rating facilitated recall for related items, but sorting did not facilitate unrelated items. In Experiment 2, younger (M?=?20) and older (M?=?74) adults sorted or rated lists comprising categories of varying sizes. Young adults' free recall conformed to predictions, but older adults again showed facilitation mainly from rating larger categories. The stronger effects for younger adults imply that specific combinations of encoding and retrieval manipulations and materials must be considered in predicting older adults' performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Neural basis for recognition confidence in younger and older adults.

Although several studies have examined the neural basis for age-related changes in objective memory performance, less is known about how the process of memory monitoring changes with aging. The authors used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine retrospective confidence in memory performance in aging. During low confidence, both younger and older adults showed behavioral evidence that they were guessing during recognition and that they were aware they were guessing when making confidence judgments. Similarly, both younger and older adults showed increased neural activity during low- compared to high-confidence responses in the lateral prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and left intraparietal sulcus. In contrast, older adults showed more high-confidence errors than younger adults. Younger adults showed greater activity for high compared to low confidence in medial temporal lobe structures, but older adults did not show this pattern. Taken together, these findings may suggest that impairments in the confidence–accuracy relationship for memory in older adults, which are often driven by high-confidence errors, may be primarily related to altered neural signals associated with greater activity for high-confidence responses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Processing speed and memory mediate age-related differences in decision making.

Decision making under risk changes with age. Increases in risk aversion with age have been most commonly characterized, although older adults may be risk seeking in some decision contexts. An important, and unanswered, question is whether these changes in decision making reflect a direct effect of aging or, alternatively, an indirect effect caused by age-related changes in specific cognitive processes. In the current study, older adults (M = 71 years) and younger adults (M = 24 years) completed a battery of tests of cognitive capacities and decision-making preferences. The results indicated systematic effects of age upon decision quality—with both increased risk seeking and increased risk aversion observed in different tasks—consistent with prior studies. Path analyses, however, revealed that age-related effects were mediated by individual differences in processing speed and memory. When those variables were included in the model, age was no longer a significant predictor of decision quality. The authors conclude that the reduction in decision quality and associated changes in risk preferences commonly ascribed to aging are instead mediated by age-related changes in underlying cognitive capacities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

In the eye of the beholder: Views of psychological well-being among middle-aged and older adults.

Although the topic of psychological well-being has generated considerable research, few studies have investigated how adults themselves define positive functioning. To probe their conceptions of well-being, interviews were conducted with a community sample of 171 middle-aged (M?=?52.5 years, SD?=?8.7) and older (M?=?73.5 years, SD?=?6.1) men and women. Questions pertained to general life evaluation, past life experiences, conceptions of well-being, and views of the aging process. Responses indicated that both age groups and sexes emphasized an "others orientation" (being a caring, compassionate person and having good relationships) in defining well-being. Middle-aged respondents stressed self-confidence, self-acceptance, and self-knowledge, whereas older persons cited accepting change as an important quality of positive functioning. In addition to attention to positive relations with others as an index of well-being, lay views pointed to a sense of humor, enjoying life, and accepting change as criteria of successful aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)