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Percentages of correct responses and judgments, by age group. This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
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This study examined age-related differences in the ability to judge one's vocabulary. Young, middle-age, and older adults completed a multiple-choice test of vocabulary, judged their confidence in each answer, and estimated their overall performance. Older adults performed better and were more confident in their knowledge than were the other 2 grou...
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... participants were underconfident in their performance, and their item-by-item calibration score was statistically different from zero, t(49) 5.52, p .01, Cohen's d 1.58. Middle-age adults were calibrated in their judgments, so that their item-by- item calibration score was not statistically different from zero, t(49) 1.76, p .085, Cohen's d .50, and the same was true for older adults, t(49) .10, p .920, Cohen's d .03. In addition, calibration scores differed significantly across groups, F(2, 147) 17.805, MSE .02, p .01, p 2 .20. A post hoc Tukey's test (p .05) revealed that younger adults were signifi- cantly less calibrated than either of the other two groups, with no difference in item-by-item calibration between the middle-age and older groups. Figure 1 shows patterns of correct responses and judgments across ...
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... Life experiences and conceptual knowledge increase across the life span: older adults have larger vocabularies and are more confident in their word knowledge (Kavé & Halamish, 2015;Verhaeghen, 2003). Although there are well-documented age-related differences in vocabulary, semantic knowledge does not exist in a vacuum. ...
Computational research suggests that semantic memory, operationalized as semantic memory networks, undergoes age-related changes. Previous work suggests that concepts in older adults' semantic memory networks are more separated, more segregated, and less connected to each other. However, cognitive network research often relies on group averages (e.g., young vs. older adults), and it remains unclear if individual differences influence age-related disparities in language production abilities. Here, we analyze the properties of younger and older participants' individual-based semantic memory networks based on their semantic relatedness judgments. We related individual-based network measures-clustering coefficient (CC; connectivity), global efficiency, and modularity (structure)-to language production (verbal fluency) and vocabulary knowledge. Similar to previous findings, we found significant age effects: CC and global efficiency were lower, and modularity was higher, for older adults. Furthermore, vocabulary knowledge was significantly related to the semantic memory network measures: corresponding with the age effects, CC and global efficiency had a negative relationship, while modularity had a positive relationship with vocabulary knowledge. More generally, vocabulary knowledge significantly increased with age, which may reflect the critical role that the accumulation of knowledge within semantic memory has on its structure. These results highlight the impact of diverse life experiences on older adults' semantic memory and demonstrate the importance of accounting for individual differences in the aging mental lexicon. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
... Although younger adults outperformed older adults during tests of production (suggesting older adults had greater difficulty retrieving words), older adults performed better than younger adults during tests of vocabulary, suggesting they knew more words. Supporting research used a multiple choice vocabulary test, in which older and younger adults were shown a target noun and were asked to select the correct interpretation of the noun from the given answer options [15]. These results too found that older adults performed better than younger adults. ...
... Our findings are in line with research indicating that older adults are facilitated by matched contexts to the same extent as younger adults (e.g., [10,[22][23][24]). This supports the finding that older adults do have intact semantic knowledge, which they can use to facilitate their reading times as well as younger adults during language comprehension [13][14][15]. During comprehension, the first words in the matching sentence semantically primed upcoming words (i.e., the target). ...
Cognitive ageing is often associated with slower lexical processing, which might influence both language production and comprehension. Words are typically used in context, which can further influence word processing and potential age differences. However, it remains unclear how older adults are affected by context during reading. Older adults are reported to have in-tact semantic knowledge, which could potentially help them to process words predicted by semantic information in the preceding context. However, potential difficulties with semantic control might mean older adults have greater difficulty suppressing interfering information from mismatching contexts. In this study we examined the influence of contexts that either predicted a specific target word ("matched", e.g., "The man watched the lava erupt from the volcano") or predicted another word than the target ("mismatched", e.g., "The swimmer dived into the volcano") as compared to neutral contexts (e.g., "They went to see the volcano"). We also examined the potential role of task demands by asking participants to either just read the sentences for comprehension or to answer questions. Forty younger adults (18-35 years old) and forty older adults (65-80 years old) completed a self-paced reading task in which we measured reading times for the target words. Older adults showed slower reading times overall. Matched sentence contexts facilitated reading times in both age groups. Surprisingly, mismatched sentence contexts did not hinder reading times in either age group. Furthermore, reading times were not influenced by task demands. Together, this shows the importance of studying language in context. While interference from mismatching sentence contexts might have not been substantial enough to delay reading, reading was faster when processing expected words. This suggests older adults can indeed benefit from semantic knowledge to facilitate word processing during comprehension. This occurred even when no additional task was presented and people were purely reading for comprehension.
... Despite older adults having good semantic memory and often better vocabulary knowledge than younger adults (Ben- David et al., 2015;Kavé & Halamish, 2015), younger adults sometimes perform better on fluency tasks (e.g., Rodríguez-Aranda & Martinussen, 2006;Troyer et al., 1997) and can also be more original in their responses than older adults. However, some aspects of verbal fluency may be well maintained, to a certain age, in healthy older adults (Murphy & Castel, 2021). ...
... This exemplifies some of the variety of cognitive changes accompanying healthy aging (cf., Hess, 2005;Park & Festini, 2017;Salthouse, 2010), and evidence suggests that older adults are aware of many of these deficits. For example, Kavé and Halamish (2015) examined age-related differences in the ability to judge one's accuracy on a multiple-choice test of vocabulary and also estimate their overall performance. Older adults were better at assessing the accuracy of their knowledge compared with younger adults, as evidenced by their better calibration (match between prediction and performance; see also Hertzog et al., 2010). ...
... Whether completing semantic (e.g., Kavé & Halamish, 2015) or episodic memory tasks (e.g., Hertzog & Dunlosky, 2011), younger and older adults are often similarly accurate in their metamemory abilities at the item level (specific exemplars), but older adults are more accurate at the global level (estimates of overall performance; but see Dodson et al., 2007;Souchay et al., 2007). However, despite some initial overconfidence (especially in older adults), younger and older adults tend to become more metacognitively accurate with increased task experience (e.g., , and may even experience a form of "underconfidence with practice" when learning the same material in multiple sessions (Tauber & Rhodes, 2012). ...
We examined age-related similarities and differences in people’s metacognitive awareness of retrieval from semantic long-term memory as well as the originality of their responses. Participants completed several semantic fluency tasks, and before recalling items, made metacognitive predictions of their performance. Additionally, after retrieval, participants made metacognitive evaluations of the originality of their responses. Results revealed that both younger (Mage = 24.49) and older adults (Mage = 68.31) were underconfident in their performance, despite some metacognitive awareness of their ability to retrieve information from semantic memory. Younger and older adults became more metacognitively aware of their abilities with task experience, but there were no significant differences in participants’ metacognitive predictions and postdictions, although older adults believed that they were less original than younger adults. These findings revealed a “skilled and unaware” effect whereby participants were underconfident on the first trial and became less underconfident on later trials. These patterns may fit with a broader literature that has found a lack of adult age differences in metacognition for verbal skills but shows that older adults may believe that their access to original verbal knowledge may decline in older age.
... Neuroimaging research suggests that the reward value of new knowledge may decline with age due to detrimental effects of age on the brain (see Sakaki et al., 2018 for a review). However, this reduced sensitivity to new information may be compensated for by the fact that individuals' knowledge develops with age; older adults tend to have richer and more extensive knowledge about the world (Dodson et al., 2007;Kavé & Halamish, 2015). Such age-related increases in knowledge may help preserve or even boost older adults' information-seeking behavior. ...
Humans constantly search for and use information to solve a wide range of problems related to survival, social interactions, and learning. While it is clear that curiosity and the drive for knowledge occupies a central role in defining what being human means to ourselves, where does this desire to know the unknown come from? What is its purpose? And how does it operate? These are some of the core questions this book seeks to answer by showcasing new and exciting research on human information-seeking. The volume brings together perspectives from leading researchers at the cutting edge of the cognitive sciences, working on human brains and behavior within psychology, computer science, and neuroscience. These vital connections between disciplines will continue to lead to further breakthroughs in our understanding of human cognition.
... These tasks differences accounted for the age effects found in our earlier study (Gordon et al., 2018), since lexical retrieval speed is well known to decline with age (Goral et al., 2007;Gordon & Kurczek, 2014;Shao et al., 2014;Verhaegen & Poncelet, 2013), while vocabulary knowledge is typically well preserved (Goral et al., 2007;Gordon & Kindred, 2011;Kavé & Halamish, 2015;Park & Reuter-Lorenz, 2009;Shao et al., 2014;Verhaeghen, 2003). In the current study, the stronger impact of age on SF and education on LF provides further support for these differing task demands. ...
In Alzheimer's dementia (AD), greater declines in semantic fluency (SF) relative to letter fluency (LF) have been assumed to reflect semantic disintegration. However, the same pattern is observed in typical aging and neurodegenerative disorders besides AD. We examined this assumption by comparing different aspects of SF and LF performance in older adults with and without dementia, and identifying which verbal fluency measures most clearly distinguish AD from typical aging. Verbal fluency data were compared from 109 individuals with AD and 66 typically aging adults. Correct items, clusters, and errors were analyzed using both raw counts and proportions. Regression analyses examined Task-by-Group interactions and the impact of demographic variables on verbal fluency measures. ROC analyses examined the sensitivity and specificity of the different outcome measures. In regressions, interactions were found for raw but not proportional data, indicating that different group patterns were driven largely by the number of correct items produced. Similarly, in ROC analyses, raw SF totals showed stronger discriminability between groups than either raw discrepancy scores (SF-LF) or discrepancy ratios (SF/LF). Age and cognitive status (MMSE) were the strongest individual predictors of performance. Findings suggest that AD entails quantitative declines in verbal fluency, but qualitatively similar patterns of performance relative to typically aging adults. Thus, SF declines in AD seem to be at least partially attributable to an exaggeration of the underlying mechanisms common to typical aging, and do not necessarily implicate semantic disintegration.
... Among the abilities necessary to understand sentences are sustained attention for the duration of the sentence and maintaining a running memory of the input to relate what is being heard to what has just been heard and to integrate it with what is about to be heard (Ayasse et al., 2017;Harel-Arbeli et al., 2021). Further, spoken context processing may be more influenced by linguistic experience and vocabulary than the processing of a single spoken word (Stine-Morrow et al., 2006;Borovsky et al., 2012;Ben-David et al., 2015;Kavé and Halamish, 2015). Thus, the aforementioned effects of working memory on the sentence level may reflect other processes. ...
Difficulties understanding speech form one of the most prevalent complaints among older adults. Successful speech perception depends on top-down linguistic and cognitive processes that interact with the bottom-up sensory processing of the incoming acoustic information. The relative roles of these processes in age-related difficulties in speech perception, especially when listening conditions are not ideal, are still unclear. In the current study, we asked whether older adults with a larger working memory capacity process speech more efficiently than peers with lower capacity when speech is presented in noise, with another task performed in tandem. Using the Eye-tracking of Word Identification in Noise Under Memory Increased Load (E-WINDMIL) an adapted version of the “visual world” paradigm, 36 older listeners were asked to follow spoken instructions presented in background noise, while retaining digits for later recall under low (single-digit) or high (four-digits) memory load. In critical trials, instructions (e.g., “point at the candle”) directed listeners’ gaze to pictures of objects whose names shared onset or offset sounds with the name of a competitor that was displayed on the screen at the same time (e.g., candy or sandal). We compared listeners with different memory capacities on the time course for spoken word recognition under the two memory loads by testing eye-fixations on a named object, relative to fixations on an object whose name shared phonology with the named object. Results indicated two trends. (1) For older adults with lower working memory capacity, increased memory load did not affect online speech processing, however, it impaired offline word recognition accuracy. (2) The reverse pattern was observed for older adults with higher working memory capacity: increased task difficulty significantly decreases online speech processing efficiency but had no effect on offline word recognition accuracy. Results suggest that in older adults, adaptation to adverse listening conditions is at least partially supported by cognitive reserve. Therefore, additional cognitive capacity may lead to greater resilience of older listeners to adverse listening conditions. The differential effects documented by eye movements and accuracy highlight the importance of using both online and offline measures of speech processing to explore age-related changes in speech perception.
... On the other hand, there are many sources of evidence that semantic knowledge remains intact with increasing age. Consistent with this idea, older adults often have larger vocabularies compared to younger adults (Kavé and Halamish, 2015;Park et al., 2002;Verhaeghen, 2003); older and younger adults are similarly sensitive to frequency effects in picture naming (Gertel et al., 2020;Gollan et al., 2008;LaGrone and Spieler, 2006;Newman and German, 2005); and older and younger adults show similar semantic priming effects (Burke et al., 1987;Burke and Yee, 1984;D. J. Madden et al., 1993) and make similar word associations (Burke and Peters, 1986). ...
... Of note, while there was a main effect of the number of near neighbors on accuracy, the magnitude of the effect was quite modest, which suggests that these increased selection demands have the largest effect on response time. This dissociation between age-related slowing and knowledge integrity, is also consistent with the broader literature which on the one hand, has observed age-related slowing, particularly during timed tasks (e.g., Barker et al., 2022;Park et al., 2002;Salthouse, 1996) and age-related preservation or even growth of vocabulary and knowledge, which are often assessed using un-timed measures (Kavé and Halamish, 2015;Park et al., 2002;Verhaeghen, 2003). This highlights the importance of considering task constraints when considering age-related differences in performance (e.g., Gordon and Kindred, 2011). ...
As we age, language reflects patterns of both stability and change. On the one hand, vocabulary and semantic abilities are largely stable across the adult lifespan, yet lexical retrieval is often slower and less successful (i.e., slower picture naming times, increased tip of the tongue incidents). Although the behavioral bases of these effects have been well established, less is known about the brain regions that support these age-related differences. We used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to examine the neural basis of picture naming. Specifically, we were interested in whether older adults would be equally sensitive to semantic characteristics, specifically the number of semantic near neighbors. Near neighbors, defined here as items with a high degree of semantic feature overlap, were of interest as these are thought to elicit competition among potential candidates and increase naming difficulty. Consistent with prior reports, pictures with more semantic near neighbors were named more slowly and less accurately for all adults. Additionally, this interference for naming times was larger as age increased, starting around 30 years old. In contrast to the age-related behavioral slowing, the neural basis of these effects was stable across adulthood. Across all adults, a number of language-relevant regions including left posterior middle temporal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus, pars triangularis were sensitive to the number of near neighbors. Our results suggest that although middle-aged and older adults’ picture naming is more slowed by increased semantic competition, the brain regions supporting semantic processes remain stable across the adult lifespan.
... Although cognitive functions were generally underpinned by agespecific BANs, there were some interesting exceptions; we observed that BANs belonging to a subgroup of cognitive tests (i.e., RWT_catflu, RWT_letfluency, and WST_1) that assessed semantic knowledge demonstrated much higher young-to-old age-generalizability. Such knowledge has been shown not only to undergo less agerelated decline relative to other aspects of cognition but also to continue to accumulate even in the later lifespan (Kavé & Halamish, 2015;Park et al., 2002). We speculate the age-general nature of BANs in this domain of cognition is intimately linked to the resilience of semantic knowledge in the context of age-related cognitive decline. ...
Behavior-associated structural connectivity (SC) and resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) networks undergo various changes in aging. To study these changes, we proposed a continuous dimension where at one end networks generalize well across age groups in terms of behavioral predictions (age-general) and at the other end, they predict behaviors well in a specific age group but fare poorly in another age group (age-specific). We examined how age generalizability/specificity of multimodal behavioral associated brain networks varies across behavioral domains and imaging modalities. Prediction models consisting of SC and/or rsFC networks were trained to predict a diverse range of 75 behavioral outcomes in a young adult sample (N = 92). These models were then used to predict behavioral outcomes in unseen young (N = 60) and old (N = 60) subjects. As expected, behavioral prediction models derived from the young age group, produced more accurate predictions in the unseen young than old subjects. These behavioral predictions also differed significantly across behavioral domains, but not imaging modalities. Networks associated with cognitive functions, except for a few mostly relating to semantic knowledge, fell toward the age-specific end of the spectrum (i.e., poor young-to-old generalizability). These findings suggest behavior-associated brain networks are malleable to different degrees in aging; such malleability is partly determined by the nature of the behavior.
... It is widely known that even healthy aging is associated with grey matter volume reductions and functional brain changes, together with cognitive decline in a variety of domains: [6][7][8][9][10][11] memory [12][13][14][15] , sensory perception [16][17][18][19] , attention and executive functions [20][21][22] , and language [23][24][25] . ...
Motor cognitive functions and their neurophysiology evolve and degrade along the lifespan in a dramatic fashion. Current models of how the brain adapts to aging remain inspired primarily by studies on memory or language processes. Yet, aging is strongly associated with reduced motor independence and the associated degraded interaction with the environment: accordingly, any neurocognitive model of aging not considering the motor system is, ipso facto, incomplete. Here we present a meta-analysis of forty functional brain-imaging studies to address aging effects on motor control. Our results indicate that motor control is associated with aging-related changes in brain activity, involving not only motoric brain regions but also posterior areas such as the occipito-temporal cortex. Notably, some of these differences depend on the specific nature of the motor task and the level of performance achieved by the participants. These findings support neurocognitive models of aging that make fewer anatomical assumptions while also considering tasks-dependent and performance-dependent manifestations. Besides the theoretical implications, the present data also provide additional information for the motor rehabilitation domain, indicating that motor control is a more complex phenomenon than previously understood, to which separate cognitive operations can contribute and decrease in different ways with aging.
... The second half of life is characterized as a period of gains and losses (Heckhausen et al., 1989). Among the gains attributed to older age are increased wisdom, emotional stability, and experience, as well as improved functioning on certain cognitive tasks (Kavé & Halamish, 2015;Worthy et al., 2011). On the other hand, possible losses associated with older age may include physical changes in appearance and functioning, increased susceptibility to medical illnesses, losses of friends and/or partner/s, and in some countries, forced retirement from the workforce, which may result in forced separation from social support and reduced social status (Hung et al., 2011;Segel-Karpas et al., 2018). ...
Compared with gains, losses have received a substantial amount of research and public attention. The present study aims to shed light on the positive gains associated with older age from the perspective of older women. Five focus groups with 19 Israeli women over the age of 54 were conducted. Trailers of three different films were used to stimulate discussion about old age and aging and allow for reflections on societal norms in light of personal experiences. Focus group interviews were analyzed thematically. Respondents identified four contexts, characterized by reframing their experiences against societal norms. These included gender stereotypes, physical appearance, interpersonal relations, and employment. This study represents an opening to a different discourse around old age, which is characterized by gains and possibilities brought about by changes in reframing one’s experiences, while distancing oneself and exerting free will vis à vis social norms.
