scholarly journals Age-related neural correlates of cognitive task performance under increased postural load

AGE ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (6) ◽  
pp. 2111-2124 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Van Impe ◽  
S. M. Bruijn ◽  
J. P. Coxon ◽  
N. Wenderoth ◽  
S. Sunaert ◽  
...  
2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debbie Marianne Yee ◽  
Sarah L Adams ◽  
Asad Beck ◽  
Todd Samuel Braver

Motivational incentives play an influential role in value-based decision-making and cognitive control. A compelling hypothesis in the literature suggests that the brain integrates the motivational value of diverse incentives (e.g., motivational integration) into a common currency value signal that influences decision-making and behavior. To investigate whether motivational integration processes change during healthy aging, we tested older (N=44) and younger (N=54) adults in an innovative incentive integration task paradigm that establishes dissociable and additive effects of liquid (e.g., juice, neutral, saltwater) and monetary incentives on cognitive task performance. The results reveal that motivational incentives improve cognitive task performance in both older and younger adults, providing novel evidence demonstrating that age-related cognitive control deficits can be ameliorated with sufficient incentive motivation. Additional analyses revealed clear age-related differences in motivational integration. Younger adult task performance was modulated by both monetary and liquid incentives, whereas monetary reward effects were more gradual in older adults and more strongly impacted by trial-by-trial performance feedback. A surprising discovery was that older adults shifted attention from liquid valence toward monetary reward throughout task performance, but younger adults shifted attention from monetary reward toward integrating both monetary reward and liquid valence by the end of the task, suggesting differential strategic utilization of incentives. Together these data suggest that older adults may have impairments in incentive integration, and employ different motivational strategies to improve cognitive task performance. The findings suggest potential candidate neural mechanisms that may serve as the locus of age-related change, providing targets for future cognitive neuroscience investigations.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Neetu Nair

Stress is known to negatively impact physiological and psychological processes in humans. While chronic exposure to stress has been implicated in the pathology of numerous physiological and neuropsychological disorders, acute stress exposure has also been shown to impair cognitive task performance. Since the brain is the primary organ involved in detecting and responding to stressors, neuroimaging techniques have been used to explore the structural and functional neural correlates of stress. The studies presented here attempted to examine how acute stress might affect the temporally correlated activation of multiple brain regions, also known as functional connectivity, while performing cognitive tasks. Of additional interest was the role of gender and presence of the short allele polymorphism on the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene, both factors known to influence stress susceptibility, in determining effects of stress on functional connectivity during cognitive task performance. Forty-five participants with no history of neurological or psychiatric disorders were recruited to participate in the study and underwent two sessions of functional magnetic resonance imaging -- one session involved exposure to the Montreal Imaging Stress Test (MIST) to induce stress and the other session had control tasks that did not induce stress. The participants were blinded to the stress induction. Following exposure to the stress or no stress control task, the participants performed verbal fluency tasks, verbal problem-solving tasks and the emotional faces task. A priori regions of interest were defined for each of the tasks and functional connectivity differences between the a priori regions of interest under stress and no stress were examined. Additionally, the influence of gender and genotype were also examined. Results reveal specific gender and genotype-based differences in regional functional connectivity under stress and no stress during the cognitive tasks even in the absence of differences in overall task performance. The results begin to elucidate the specific neural underpinnings of stress susceptibility in healthy individuals. The implications of these results in better understanding the neural correlates of stress related cognitive impairments, and may ultimately be helpful for neuropsychiatric disorders such as anxiety, depression and posttraumatic stress disorders and may help us move towards developing targeted neuropharmacological therapeutic interventions are discussed.


Nutrients ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 2504
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Bramorska ◽  
Wanda Zarzycka ◽  
Wiktoria Podolecka ◽  
Katarzyna Kuc ◽  
Aneta Brzezicka

Our study aimed to evaluate whether the type of food products and the frequency of their consumption are associated with cognitive functioning in younger and older adults. The impact of diets that are high in added sugars and saturated fat on cognitive functioning, especially on memory, was at the center of our interest. Participants in the study were 204 healthy adults (aged 20–55) who performed a multitasking cognitive test and completed dietary and psychological questionnaires. Stepwise regression analysis with age and food consumption patterns as predictors, and the cognitive task performance as a dependent variable, revealed that cognitive task performance worsened with age. However, we found that the frequency of consuming different types of foods (healthy versus unhealthy dietary patterns) moderates the effects of age on cognitive functioning. Red meat and animal fat consumption were negatively correlated with cognitive performance, and this relation was dependent on the age of our participants. Conversely, white meat and fish consumption were positively related to memory. Different indices of dietary patterns (both positive and negative) were stronger predictors of cognitive performance in the older adult group. We interpret our results as evidence that diet may be a protective (or worsening) factor in age-related cognitive decline.


2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura K. Varner ◽  
Scott A. Crossley ◽  
Erica L. Snow ◽  
Danielle S. McNamara

2021 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 103882
Author(s):  
Rosleen Mansour ◽  
Anthony R. Ward ◽  
David M. Lane ◽  
Katherine A. Loveland ◽  
Michael G. Aman ◽  
...  

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