scholarly journals Age Differences in Diffusivity in the Locus Coeruleus and its Ascending Noradrenergic Tract

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shai Porat ◽  
Francesca Sibilia ◽  
Josephine Yoon ◽  
Yonggang Shi ◽  
Martin J. Dahl ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Locus Coeruleus ◽  
Fractional Anisotropy ◽  
Age Differences ◽  
Younger Adults ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Brainstem Nucleus ◽  
Aging Study ◽  
Weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging ◽  
Opposing Effects

The noradrenergic locus coeruleus (LC) is a small brainstem nucleus that promotes arousal and attention. Recent studies have examined the microstructural properties of the LC using diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging and found unexpected age-related differences in fractional anisotropy - a measure of white matter integrity. Here, we used three datasets (Berlin Aging Study-II, N = 301, the Leipzig Study for Mind-Body-Emotion Interactions, N = 220, and Stockholm Sleepy Brain, N = 49), to replicate published findings and expand them by investigating diffusivity in the LC's ascending noradrenergic bundle. In younger adults, LC fractional anisotropy was significantly lower, compared to older adults. However, in the LC's ascending noradrenergic bundle, we observed significantly higher fractional anisotropy in younger adults, relative to older adults. These findings indicate that diffusivity in the LC versus the ascending noradrenergic bundle are both susceptible to microstructural changes in aging that have opposing effects on fractional anisotropy.

Age Differences in the Social Associative Learning of Trust Information

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kendra Leigh Seaman ◽  
Alexander P. Christensen ◽  
Katherine Senn ◽  
Jessica Cooper ◽  
Brittany Shane Cassidy
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Age Differences ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
Trust Game ◽  
Time Model ◽  
Younger Adults ◽  
Cortical Areas ◽  
Age Related ◽  
The Social ◽  
Over Time

Trust is a key component of social interaction. Older adults, however, often exhibit excessive trust relative to younger adults. One explanation is that older adults may learn to trust differently than younger adults. Here, we examine how younger (N=33) and older adults (N=30) learn to trust over time. Participants completed a classic iterative trust game with three partners. Younger and older adults shared similar amounts but differed in how they shared money. Compared to younger adults, older adults invested more with untrustworthy partners and less with trustworthy partners. As a group, older adults displayed less learning than younger adults. However, computational modeling shows that this is because older adults are more likely to forget what they have learned over time. Model-based fMRI analyses revealed several age-related differences in neural processing. Younger adults showed prediction error signals in social processing areas while older adults showed over-recruitment of several cortical areas. Collectively, these findings suggest that older adults attend to and learn from social cues differently from younger adults.

scholarly journals Adult age differences in subjective responses to dynamic socioemotional incentives

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sade J Abiodun ◽  
Galen McAllister ◽  
Gregory Russell Samanez-Larkin ◽  
Kendra Leigh Seaman
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Age Differences ◽  
Emotional Valence ◽  
Incentive Motivation ◽  
Social Signals ◽  
Younger Adults ◽  
Positivity Effect ◽  
Adult Age ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Adult Age Differences

Facial expressions are powerful communicative social signals that motivate feelings and action in the observer. However, research on incentive motivation has overwhelmingly focused on money and points and the limited research on social incentives has been mostly focused on responses in young adulthood. Previous research on the age-related positivity effect and adult age differences in social motivation suggest that older adults might experience higher levels of positive arousal to socioemotional stimuli than younger adults. Affect ratings following dynamic emotional expressions (anger, happiness, sadness) varying in magnitude of expression showed that higher magnitude expressions elicited higher arousal and valence ratings. Older adults did not differ significantly in levels of arousal when compared to younger adults, however their ratings of emotional valence were significantly higher as the magnitude of expressions increased. The findings provide novel evidence that socioemotional incentives may be relatively more reinforcing as adults age. More generally, these dynamic socioemotional stimuli that vary in magnitude are ideal for future studies of more naturalistic affect elicitation, studies of social incentive processing, and use in incentive-driven choice tasks.

scholarly journals ANGER, LOVE, SADNESS: DO EMOTION WORDS HAVE THE SAME SEMANTIC MEANING ACROSS AGE-GROUPS?

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S841-S842
Author(s):  
Madeline J Nichols ◽  
Jennifer A Bellingtier ◽  
Frances Buttelmann
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Age Differences ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Semantic Meaning ◽  
Younger Adults ◽  
Emotion Words ◽  
Emotion Word ◽  
Age Related

Abstract Every day we use emotion words to describe our experiences, but past research finds that the meanings of these words can vary. Furthermore, historical shifts in language use and experiential knowledge of the emotions may contribute to age-differences in what these emotion words convey. We examined age-related differences in the valence, arousal, and expression connoted by the words anger, love, and sadness. We predicted age-related differences in the semantic meanings of the words would emerge such that older adults would more clearly differentiate the positivity/negativity of the words, whereas younger adults would report higher endorsement for the conveyed arousal and expression. Participants included American and German older adults (N=61; mean age=68.98) and younger adults (N=77; mean age=20.77). Using the GRID instrument (Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, 2013), they rated each emotion word for its valence, arousal, and expression when used by a speaker of the participant’s native language. Across emotions and dimensions, older adults were generally more moderate in their understanding of emotion words. For example, German older adults rated anger and sadness as suggesting the speaker felt less bad and more good than the younger adults. American older adults rated love as connoting the speaker felt more bad and less good than younger adults. Arousal ratings were higher for German younger, as opposed to older, adults. Cultural differences were most pronounced for sadness such that German participants gave more moderate answers than American participants. Overall, our research suggests that there are age-related differences in the understanding of emotion words.

scholarly journals Encoding and retrieval eye movements mediate age differences in pattern completion

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordana Wynn ◽  
Bradley Buchsbaum ◽  
Jennifer Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Age Differences ◽  
False Alarms ◽  
Memory Errors ◽  
Younger Adults ◽  
Pattern Completion ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Retrieval Processes ◽  
New Information ◽  
Encoding And Retrieval

Older adults often mistake new information as ‘old’, yet, the mechanisms underlying this response bias remain unclear. Typically, false alarms by older adults are thought to reflect pattern completion – the retrieval of a previously encoded stimulus in response to partial input. However, other work suggests that age-related retrieval errors can be accounted for by deficient encoding processes. In the present study, we used eye movement (EM) monitoring to quantify older adults’ pattern completion bias as a function of EMs during both encoding and partially cued retrieval. Analysis of EMs revealed reduced encoding-related differentiation (i.e., more similar EMs across encoded images) and increased retrieval-related reinstatement (i.e., more similar EMs across encoding and retrieval) by older relative to younger adults, with both encoding and retrieval EMs predicting false alarms. These findings indicate that age-related changes in both encoding and retrieval processes, indexed by EMs, underlie older adults’ increased vulnerability to memory errors.

scholarly journals Pronoun production remains stable over the adult lifespan for contexts with topic continuity

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeleine Long ◽  
Hannah Rohde ◽  
Paula Rubio-Fernandez
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Age Differences ◽  
Perspective Taking ◽  
Referential Communication ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Younger Adults ◽  
Discourse Context ◽  
Adult Lifespan ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Referential Choice

A prevalent finding in the referential communication literature is that older adults produce more ambiguous pronouns than younger adults, likely because they have difficulty determining the prominence of referents. This finding has been widely understood to reflect a general age-related deficit in communication. However, all studies from this line of work have used materials involving topic shifts (i.e. when the to-be-named referent shifts from one character to another, which requires perspective-taking and can be cognitively costly). To determine the extent to which younger and older adults’ pronominal use diverges, we investigated whether other aspects of the discourse context influence age-related differences in referential choice, apart from topic shifts. Here we tested a large sample of adults (N=496, ages 18-82) using narrative elicitation tasks across four experiments and nine contexts of topic continuity (i.e. contexts in which the to-be-named referent remained the same). In Experiments 1 and 2, we varied the number of characters in the scene while keeping the sex/gender of the characters distinct and found that pronominal use did not differ by age for scenes with 1, 2, and 3 characters. In Experiments 3 and 4, we varied the number of characters, the sex/gender of those characters (such that they were the same or different), and the linguistic emphasis placed on the main character. Again, we found no age differences across all conditions. Taken together, our findings suggest that older adults’ difficulty with prominence estimates is not all- encompassing, but rather appears to be confined to contexts involving topic shifts.

scholarly journals Virtual Hand Illusion in younger and older adults

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 205566832110593
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. Campos ◽  
Graziella El-Khechen Richandi ◽  
Marge Coahran ◽  
Lindsey E. Fraser ◽  
Babak Taati ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Age Differences ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Tactile Feedback ◽  
Younger Adults ◽  
Localization Accuracy ◽  
Virtual Hand ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Spatio Temporal

Introduction Embodiment involves experiencing ownership over our body and localizing it in space and is informed by multiple senses (visual, proprioceptive and tactile). Evidence suggests that embodiment and multisensory integration may change with older age. The Virtual Hand Illusion (VHI) has been used to investigate multisensory contributions to embodiment, but has never been evaluated in older adults. Spatio-temporal factors unique to virtual environments may differentially affect the embodied perceptions of older and younger adults. Methods Twenty-one younger (18–35 years) and 19 older (65+ years) adults completed the VHI paradigm. Body localization was measured at baseline and again, with subjective ownership ratings, following synchronous and asynchronous visual-tactile interactions. Results Higher ownership ratings were observed in the synchronous relative to the asynchronous condition, but no effects on localization/drift were found. No age differences were observed. Localization accuracy was biased in both age groups when the virtual hand was aligned with the real hand, indicating a visual mislocalization of the virtual hand. Conclusions No age-related differences in the VHI were observed. Mislocalization of the hand in VR occurred for both groups, even when congruent and aligned; however, tactile feedback reduced localization biases. Our results expand the current understanding of age-related changes in multisensory embodiment within virtual environments.

Role of Emotion and Cognition on Age Differences in the Framing Effect

2017 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bingyan Pu ◽  
Huamao Peng ◽  
Shiyong Xia
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Age Differences ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Emotional Arousal ◽  
Framing Effect ◽  
Cognitive Resources ◽  
Age Difference ◽  
Younger Adults ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Life Saving

Framing effect studies indicate that individuals are risk averse for decisions framed as gains but risk-seeking for decisions framed as losses. Findings of age-related differences in susceptibility to framing are mixed. In the current study, we examined emotional arousal in two decision tasks (life saving vs. money gambling) to evaluate the effects of emotion on age differences in the framing effect. When cognitive abilities and styles were controlled, there was a framing effect in the younger group in the life-saving task, a high-emotional arousal task, while older adults did not display this classic framing effect pattern. They showed risk aversion in both positive and negative framing. Age differences existed in the framing effect. Conversely, younger and older adults in the money-gambling task both displayed the framing effect; there was no age difference. When the cognitive abilities were not controlled, the pattern of results in the high-emotional arousal task remained unchanged, while greater framing effects were found, from the perspective of effect size, for older than younger adults in the low-emotional arousal task. Limited cognitive resources would not hamper older adults’ performances when their emotional arousal was high. However, older adults with low-level emotional arousal were more susceptible than younger adults to framing because of declining cognitive capacities. This implied the importance of emotion in older adults’ decision making and supported the selective engagement hypothesis.

Looking the same, but remembering differently: Preserved eye-movement synchrony with age during movie-watching

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Davis ◽  
Emily Chemnitz ◽  
Tyler K. Collins ◽  
Linda Geerligs ◽  
Karen L. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Eye Movement ◽  
Age Differences ◽  
Neural Activity ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Cued Recall ◽  
False Information ◽  
Younger Adults ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Movement Synchrony

Naturalistic stimuli (e.g., movies) provide the opportunity to study lifelike experiences in the lab. While young adults respond to these stimuli in a highly synchronized manner (as indexed by intersubject correlations [ISC] in their neural activity), older adults respond more idiosyncratically. Here, we examine whether eye movement synchrony (eye-ISC) also declines with age during movie-watching and whether it relates to memory for the movie. Our results show no age-related decline in eye-ISC, suggesting that age differences in neural ISC are not caused by differences in viewing patterns. Both age groups recalled the same number of episodic details from the movie, however, older adults recalled more semantic and false information. In both age groups, more recall of false information related to lower eye-ISC. Finally, older adults showed better cued-recall than younger adults across event boundaries, suggesting that older adults may form broader associations across events when encoding everyday experiences.

Theoretical Perspectives on Age Differences in Brain Activation: HAROLD, PASA, CRUNCH—How Do They STAC Up?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara B. Festini ◽  
Laura Zahodne ◽  
Patricia A. Reuter-Lorenz
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Age Differences ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
General Pattern ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Brain Activation ◽  
Cognitive Change ◽  
Younger Adults ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Age Related

Cognitive neuroimaging studies often report that older adults display more activation of neural networks relative to younger adults, referred to as overactivation. Greater or more widespread activity frequently involves bilateral recruitment of both cerebral hemispheres, especially the frontal cortex. In many reports, overactivation has been associated with superior cognitive performance, suggesting that this activity may reflect compensatory processes that offset age-related decline and maintain behavior. Several theories have been proposed to account for age differences in brain activation, including the Hemispheric Asymmetry Reduction in Older Adults (HAROLD) model, the Posterior-Anterior Shift in Aging (PASA) theory, the Compensation-Related Utilization of Neural Circuits Hypothesis (CRUNCH), and the Scaffolding Theory of Aging and Cognition (STAC and STAC-r). Each model has a different explanatory scope with regard to compensatory processes, and each has been highly influential in the field. HAROLD contrasts the general pattern of bilateral prefrontal activation in older adults with that of more unilateral activation in younger adults. PASA describes both anterior (e.g., frontal) overactivation and posterior (e.g., occipital) underactivation in older adults relative to younger adults. CRUNCH emphasizes that the level or extent of brain activity can change in response to the level of task demand at any age. Finally, STAC and STAC-r take the broadest perspective to incorporate individual differences in brain structure, the capacity to implement functional scaffolding, and life-course neural enrichment and depletion factors to predict cognition and cognitive change across the lifespan. Extant empirical work has documented that compensatory overactivation can be observed in regions beyond the prefrontal cortex, that variations in task difficulty influence the degree of brain activation, and that younger adults can show compensatory overactivation under high mental demands. Additional research utilizing experimental designs (e.g., transcranial magnetic stimulation), longitudinal assessments, greater regional precision, both verbal and nonverbal material, and measures of individual difference factors will continue to refine our understanding of age-related activation differences and adjudicate among these various accounts of neurocognitive aging.

scholarly journals Effects of Age Differences in Memory Formation on Neural Mechanisms of Consolidation and Retrieval

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myriam C. Sander ◽  
Yana Fandakova ◽  
Markus Werkle-Bergner
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Age Differences ◽  
Cognitive Aging ◽  
Younger Adults ◽  
Memory Decline ◽  
Memory Processing ◽  
Memory Impairments ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Memory Network

Episodic memory decline is a hallmark of cognitive aging and a multifaceted phenomenon. We review studies that target age differences across different memory processing stages, i.e., from encoding to retrieval. The available evidence cumulates in the proposition that older adults form memories of lower quality than younger adults, which has negative downstream consequences for later processing stages. We argue that low memory quality in combination with age-related neural decline of key regions of the episodic memory network puts older adults in a double jeopardy situation that finally results in broader memory impairments in older compared to younger adults.

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