Delphine Fagot

• University of Geneva

Executive functions, which are high-level effortful cognitive functions that facilitate the achievement of an intentional goal, generally decline with age. The capacity to inhibit an action, an urge, a thought, or an emotion, intentionally is an executive function that plays a crucial role in daily life. The aging process, which affects this inhibi...

Objectives: The present study set out to investigate associations of cognitive reserve (as indicated by education) and relational reserve (as indicated by the family network size and indices of emotional support) to decline in executive functioning over six years as measured by changes in Trail Making Test (TMT) completion time in older adults and...

Objective: The adverse effects of anxiety on cognition are widely recognized. According to Attentional Control Theory, worry (i.e. facet of cognitive anxiety) is the component that is responsible for these effects, and working memory capacity (WMC) plays an important role in regulating them. Despite the increasing importance of this problem with ag...

Objectives: Interindividual differences in cognitive aging may be explained by differences in cognitive reserve (CR) that are built up across the life span. A plausible but underresearched mechanism for these differences is that CR helps compensating cognitive decline by enhancing motivation to cope with challenging cognitive situations. Theories...

Frailty is a core concept in understanding vulnerability and adjustment to stress in older adults. Adopting the perspective provided by the transactional model of stress and coping (Lazarus and Folkman in Stress, appraisal, and coping, Springer, New York, 1984), the present study examined three aspects of frailty in older adults: (1) the link betwe...

Objective: We investigated cross-lagged relations between leisure activity participation and Trail Making Test (TMT) performance over 6 years and whether those reciprocal associations differed between individuals. Method: We analyzed data from 232 participants tested on performance in TMT Parts A and B as well as interviewed on leisure activity...

Objectives: The present study set out to investigate relations of the number of chronic diseases (as a global indicator of individuals’ multimorbidity) to cognitive status and cognitive decline over six years as measured by changes in Trail Making Test (TMT) completion time in old adults and whether those relations differed by key life course marke...

Within-task variability across trials (intra-individual variability (IIV)) has been mainly studied using latency measures but rarely with accuracy measures. The aim of the Geneva Variability Study was to examine IIV in both latency and accuracy measures of cognitive performance across the lifespan, administering the same tasks to children, younger...

p>It is well known that cognitive decline in older adults is of smaller amplitude in longitudinal than in cross-sectional studies. Yet, the measure of interest rests generally with aggregated group data. A focus on individual developmental trajectories is rare, mainly because it is difficult to assess intraindividual change reliably. Individual dif...

Background: In the elderly, physical activity (PA) enhances cognitive performances, increases brain plasticity and improves brain health. The neurotrophic hypothesis is that the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which is implicated in brain plasticity and cognition, is triggered by PA because motoneurons secrete BDNF into the blo...

While age effects in reaction time (RT) tasks across the lifespan are well established for level of performance, analogous findings have started appearing also for indicators of intra-individual variability (IIV). Children are not only slower, but also display more variability than younger adults in RT. Yet, little is known about potential moderati...

It is well-known that processing speed and executive functions decline with advancing age. However, physical activity (PA) has a positive impact on cognitive performances in aging, specifically for inhibition. Less is known concerning intraindividual variability (iiV) in reaction times. This study aims to investigate the influence of PA and sex dif...

The present study is the first so far in empirically testing the recent conceptual view that the number of chronic diseases may mediate between the build-up of cognitive reserve (e.g., by educational attainment and cognitive level of job) on the one hand and cognitive performance on the other. We assessed Psychometric tests on processing speed and...

Background: Recently, Paggi et al. (Gerontology 2016;62:450-458) for the very first time showed in a cross-sectional sample of 259 adults aged 18 to 81 years that the relation of physical health to psychological well-being was mediated via frequency of leisure activity participation. Objective: To extend this framework, we followed theories on succ...

We investigated whether the relation of educational attainment and cognitive level of job to performance in verbal ability and processing speed in old age was mediated via the number of chronic diseases. A total of 2,812 older adults participated. Psychometric tests on verbal ability and processing speed were administered. Individuals were intervie...

Health research suggests that findings on young-old adults cannot be generalized to old-old adults and thus that old-old age seems not a simple continuation of young-old age due to qualitative changes that result in a discontinuity in old age. Specifically, it would be of conceptual and methodological importance to inform research regarding estimat...

Aims: The present study set out to investigate the relation of obesity to performance in verbal abilities, processing speed, and cognitive flexibility and its interplay with key correlates of cognitive reserve in a large sample of older adults. Methods: A total of 2,812 older adults served as a sample for the present study. Psychometric tests on...

Background: The role of timing of retirement on cognitive functioning in old age is inconclusive so far. Therefore, the present study set out to investigate the association of timing of retirement with cognitive performance and its interplay with key correlates of cognitive reserve in a large sample of older adults. Methods: Two thousand two hun...

Introduction: Findings on the association of speaking different languages with cognitive functioning in old age are inconsistent and inconclusive so far. Therefore, the present study set out to investigate the relation of the number of languages spoken to cognitive performance and its interplay with several other markers of cognitive reserve in a...

This chapter focuses on the “Vivre-Leben-Vivere” (VLV) research and explains how the team in charge has dealt with the issue of representing old people in Switzerland and the vulnerable persons within this population. For this purpose, we draw inspiration from the “total survey error” perspective and discuss the procedures that were used to collect...

Background: The relevance of mental health for everyday life functioning and well-being is crucial. In this context, higher educational attainment, higher cognitive level of one's occupation, and more engaging in stimulating leisure activities have been found to be associated with better cognitive functioning in old age. Yet, the detailed pattern...

Objectives: A key question in gerontological research concerns whether good functioning can be maintained in some cognitive abilities in old age, even if deficits occur in other cognitive or sensory abilities. Our goals were to investigate relations of cognitive and sensory abilities in old age, whether these relations differed in size across old...

Cognitive heterogeneity or dispersion, referring to intraindividual variability across tasks, has often been studied in pathological subgroups, but is rarely studied in normal cognitive development. The aim of the present study was to explore age differences in dispersion across the lifespan, in two domains: processing speed and working memory (WM)...

Introduction: A growing body of research suggests that intraindividual variability (IIV) may bring specific information on cognitive functioning, additional to that provided by the mean. The present paper focuses on dispersion, i.e., IIV across tasks, and its developmental trend across the lifespan. Method: Five hundred and fifty seven participant...

Within-individual changes in older adults in both mean level of performance and intraindividual variability were analyzed, using bootstrap analyses, in a longitudinal study over a period of 4-5 years. Results showed little systematic change and large inter-individual differences in intraindividual change and in intraindividual variability.

One of the fundamental challenges for gerontological research is how to maintain and promote intact cognitive functioning in old age. Previous research revealed that high educational level, good health status, and an active lifestyle during adulthood seem to be protective against cognitive impairment in old age. However, up to now, a detailed exami...

Working memory (WM) and intraindividual variability (IIV) in processing speed are both hypothesized to reflect general attentional processes. In the present study, we aimed at exploring the relationship between WM capacity and IIV in reaction times (RTs) and its possible variation with development across the lifespan. Two WM tasks and six RT tasks...

In a sample of 165 older individuals assessed twice at a 2-year interval on tasks of fluid and crystallized intelligence, and intensively (120 trials) on a simple reaction time task, we applied an autoregressive model to estimate both (1) amplitude and (2) time dependency in intraindividual variability (IIV). Results indicate that both IIV features...

Previous studies have shown that intraindividual variability (iV) in performance is an important indicator of individual’s cognitive functioning and neurological integrity. While most experiments have examined iV of performance using Reaction Time data (RTs), few studies have considered it with accuracy measures (e.g. number or percentage of correc...

Individual differences in working memory (WM) have been shown to reflect the ability to control attention in order to prevent interference. This study examines the role of WM capacity in resisting interference in the Hayling task, in samples of younger and older adults. In each age group, high and low WM span individuals had to complete high-cloze...

In order to measure intra-individual variability, studies usually used the Intra-Individual Standard Deviation (ISD) and/or the Intra-Individual Coefficient of Variation (ICV). Both coefficients are used on reaction times (RT) as well as on accuracy scores. The ISD is measuring variability on an absolute scale while the ICV can be considered as a r...

The aim of this study was to examine to what extent inhibitory control and working memory capacity are related across the life span. Intrusion errors committed by children and younger and older adults were investigated in two versions of the Reading Span Test. In Experiment 1, a mixed Reading Span Test with items of various list lengths was adminis...

In the Geneva Variability Study, the Stroop task was administered to children and young adults. Interference and facilitation effects were investigated by comparing mean reaction times (RTs) and applying ex-Gaussian distribution analysis. Our analyses were motivated by three goals: First, we aimed to replicate the results obtained with young adults...

From its origins until the end of the 1960s, developmental psychology was mainly concerned with the study of change in children's functioning and partly with developmental processes in adolescence. From the 1970s, the demographic aging of our societies and the problems associated with this change led to a new stream of research within the field of...

Depuis ses origines jusque vers la fin des années 1960, la psychologie du développement s’est centrée sur l’étude des changements dans le fonctionnement psychologique de l’enfant, et en partie de l’adolescent. A partir des années 1970, le vieillissement démographique de nos sociétés et les problèmes liés à l’avancée en âge ont été à l’origine d’un...