ArticleLiterature Review

Cognitive Control As a Double-Edged Sword

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Abstract

Cognitive control, the ability to limit attention to goal-relevant information, aids performance on a wide range of laboratory tasks. However, there are many day-to-day functions which require little to no control and others which even benefit from reduced control. We review behavioral and neuroimaging evidence demonstrating that reduced control can enhance the performance of both older and, under some circumstances, younger adults. Using healthy aging as a model, we demonstrate that decreased cognitive control benefits performance on tasks ranging from acquiring and using environmental information to generating creative solutions to problems. Cognitive control is thus a double-edged sword – aiding performance on some tasks when fully engaged, and many others when less engaged.

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... Although the literature has typically focused on the role of the hippocampus in pattern separation, the contribution of processes in extra-hippocampal regions has received less attention. However, a distinct but substantial literature has illustrated that regions in the frontoparietal control network contribute to functions similar to pattern separation (or result in outcomes that are consistent with pattern separation function), such as resolving interference between competing memories or stimuli (e.g., Badre and Wagner, 2007;Amer et al., 2016). This raises important questions about whether and how these processes directly contribute to, or modulate, hippocampal pattern separation. ...
... Finally, an aging study provided similar evidence by demonstrating that well-documented pattern separation deficits in older adults can, at least partly, be accounted for by representations maintained in regions that feed into the hippocampus (Weeks et al., 2020). Specifically, in a delayed match-to-sample task that required participants to maintain in memory only a subset of presented (relevant) images for a subsequent old-lure discrimination task, older adults with reduced cognitive control abilities (e.g., Amer et al., 2016), maintained information from irrelevant images in MTL regions (including the hippocampus) and in regions that feed into the hippocampus (including the lateral occipital cortex), relative to young adults. Importantly, the extent to which this irrelevant information was maintained was associated with behavioral performance on the mnemonic discrimination task across both age groups. ...
... In the case of older adults, given that pattern separation deficits are considered one of the defining features of aging, one potentially important outcome of the CHiPS framework is to examine the extent of the contribution of the distinct stages of pattern separation, and their interaction, to these deficits. Starting with the well-documented age-related cognitive control deficits (e.g., Amer et al., 2016), it will be important to investigate how reduced top-down modulation of downstream regions (and overrepresentation of irrelevant information/features) feeding into the hippocampus impacts hippocampal computations, representations, and memory structure (see Amer et al., 2022 for a discussion of changes in memory structure with old age). Additionally, studying interactions between age-related attentional or control deficits and structural and functional alterations of MTL regions, including the hippocampus (e.g., Yassa et al., 2011a;Reagh et al., 2018) will be critical for our understanding of how age-related changes in brain-wide function contribute to pattern separation deficits and mnemonic interference with old age. ...
Article
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Pattern separation, or the process by which highly similar stimuli or experiences in memory are represented by non-overlapping neural ensembles, has typically been ascribed to processes supported by the hippocampus. Converging evidence from a wide range of studies, however, suggests that pattern separation is a multistage process supported by a network of brain regions. Based on this evidence, considered together with related findings from the interference resolution literature, we propose the 'cortico-hippocampal pattern separation' (CHiPS) framework, which asserts that brain regions involved in cognitive control play a significant role in pattern separation. Particularly, these regions may contribute to pattern separation by (1) resolving interference in sensory regions that project to the hippocampus, thus regulating its cortical input, or (2) directly modulating hippocampal processes in accordance with task demands. Considering recent interest in how hippocampal operations are modulated by goal states likely represented and regulated by extra-hippocampal regions, we argue that pattern separation is similarly supported by neocortical-hippocampal interactions.
... The combined action of DMN and ECN affects creative behaviour through two Persistence, executive and cognitive control activity stimulates ECN in order to focus attention on a task; refers to the capacity to focus on pertinent information and keep distracting information away (Amer, Campbell, & Hasher, 2016;Boot et al., 2017;Khalil et al., 2019). Persistence increases performance in tasks that require focused and selective attention and is responsible for hard work and dedication to purposeful investigation of creative prospects leading to both generation and evaluation of creative ideas (Amer et al., 2016). ...
... The combined action of DMN and ECN affects creative behaviour through two Persistence, executive and cognitive control activity stimulates ECN in order to focus attention on a task; refers to the capacity to focus on pertinent information and keep distracting information away (Amer, Campbell, & Hasher, 2016;Boot et al., 2017;Khalil et al., 2019). Persistence increases performance in tasks that require focused and selective attention and is responsible for hard work and dedication to purposeful investigation of creative prospects leading to both generation and evaluation of creative ideas (Amer et al., 2016). (Boot et al., 2017;Di Domenico & Ryan, 2017;Jia et al., 2019;Khalil et al., 2019;Nijstad et al., 2010;Rubenstein et al., 2018;Wang & Nickerson, 2017). ...
... -Fluid intelligence: subtract of general intelligence associated with the ability to come up with solutions to problems and think in a logical way regardless of the level of knowledge that they acquired previously; related to rational thinking and executive control; positively correlated with creative outcomes and prominent within organizational literature (Sternberg, 1997) (Silvia, 2015) -Memory: relevant for different stages of creativity (Kenett & Faust, 2019;Silvia, 2015). Working memory capacity, quantity of information that can kept within working memory at any time, has been related with persistence (Amer et al., 2016;Boot et al., 2017;Khalil et al., 2019). High working memory capacity can increase cognitive flexibility, leading to more creative problem solving (Amer et al., 2016). ...
... In other words, older participants would attend to distractors, which might enhance accessibility. Attention to task-irrelevant distractors in an earlier task would be adaptive to aid subsequent tasks when the earlier distractors become relevant in the future task (Amer et al., 2016(Amer et al., , 2020. ...
... That is, individuals who could suppress their attention toward distractors could rapidly detect a target. According to Amer et al. (2016), individuals with high cognitive control narrow the focus of attention and reduce interference effects, whereas individuals with low cognitive control rely on the use of information from diverse sources. For former individuals, at the cost of suppression distractors, LTM is impaired. ...
Article
In a visual search task, attention to task-irrelevant distractors impedes search performance. However, is it maladaptive to future performance? Here, I showed that attended distractors in a visual search task were better remembered in long-term memory (LTM) in the subsequent surprise recognition task than non-attended distractors. In four experiments, participants performed a visual search task using real-world objects of a single color. They encoded color in working memory (WM) during the task; because each object had a different color, participants directed their attention to the WM-matching colored distractor. Then, in the surprise recognition task, participants were required to indicate whether an object had been shown in the earlier visual search task, regardless of its color. The results showed that attended distractors were remembered better in LTM than non-attended distractors (Experiments 1 and 2). Moreover, the more participants directed their attention to distractors, the better they explicitly remembered them. Participants did not explicitly remember the color of the attended distractors (Experiment 3) but remembered integrated information with object and color (Experiment 4). When the color of the distractors in the recognition task was mismatched with the color in the visual search task, LTM decreased compared to color-matching distractors. These results suggest that attention to distractors impairs search for a target but is helpful in remembering distractors in LTM. When task-irrelevant distractors become task-relevant information in the future, their attention becomes beneficial.
... Blanking on the name of a friend or losing track when taking one's medication may not only elicit negative emotions in the moment; executive functioning blips can accumulate over time and impair older adults' quality of life. Yet, a growing body of work shows that lower executive functioning is not always maladaptive (Amer et al., 2016). And although lower executive functioning is often associated with mental health symptoms, such as depression or anxiety (e.g., Wilson et al., 2002), this link is by no means inevitable (e.g., Buckner, 2004;Mather & Ponzio, 2016). ...
... Specifically, future research could examine whether helping older adults appreciate the benefits of less engaged cognitive control may have positive consequences-similar to studies that show that helping individuals appreciate the benefits of physiological stress responses has positive effects (Jamieson et al., 2012). In fact, there are studies showing that low executive functioning not only has negative consequences but also (underappreciated) positive effects, especially in late life (for a review, see Amer et al., 2016). These studies demonstrate that while high executive functioning is beneficial for tasks that require high goal focus, low executive functioning is beneficial for tasks that require acquiring and using environmental information and generating creative solutions to problems. ...
Article
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Emotional acceptance is thought to play an important role in protecting mental health. However, few studies have examined emotional acceptance among older adults who may experience declines in functioning, including executive functioning. The present laboratory-based study examined whether emotional acceptance and (to determine specificity) detachment and positive reappraisal moderated links between executive functioning and mental health symptoms in a sample of healthy older adults. Emotion regulation strategies were measured using questionnaire-based measures (using established questionnaires) as well as performance-based measures (instructing individuals to use emotional acceptance, detachment, and positive reappraisal in response to sad film clips). Executive functioning was measured using a battery of working memory, inhibition, and verbal fluency tasks. Mental health symptoms were measured using questionnaires to assess anxiety and depressive symptoms. Results showed that (a) emotional acceptance moderated the link between executive functioning and mental health such that lower executive functioning predicted higher levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms at low but not at high levels of emotional acceptance. Moderation effects tended to be (b) stronger for emotional acceptance compared to the other emotion regulation strategies (though not all comparisons were statistically significant). Findings were (c) robust when controlling for age, gender, and education for questionnaire-based (but not performance-based) emotional acceptance. These findings contribute to the literature on emotion regulation specificity and highlight the mental health benefits of emotional acceptance in the face of low executive functioning.
... This is supported by neuroimaging findings, showing that while younger participants engaged the proactive control network when asked to filter out task-irrelevant distractors (inhibiting distractors before they have appeared), older adults recruited a reactive control mechanism for distractor inhibition (inhibiting distractors only after they have appeared; Ashinoff et al., 2020;Braver, 2012;Paxton et al., 2008;Vadaga et al., 2016). Novel theorizing suggests that the reduced attentional control associated with normal aging can be beneficial in a range of cognitive tasks that rely less on top-down mechanisms and more on automatic implicitbased learning (for a recent review, see Amer et al., 2016). This idea stems from the findings that attentional selection history effects are preserved in older adults. ...
... Taken together, these findings support the notion that the preservation of habitual attention in older adults may allow them to proficiently allocate visuospatial attention. More in general, these results may suggest that automatic and implicit-based attentional learning mechanisms may be preserved even despite a more general deficit in attentional mechanisms and reduced cognitive control induced by aging or development and neurocognitive disease (Amer et al., 2016). In line with this notion, unimpaired spatial location probability learning has been demonstrated not only in older adults (Jiang, 2018;Jiang et al., 2016;Twedell et al., 2017) but also in patients with Parkinson's disease (Sisk et al., 2018), in children (Lee et al., 2020;Yang & Song, 2021), and in autistic spectrum disorder (Jiang, Capistrano, et al., 2013). ...
Article
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In recent years, the use of implicit mechanisms based on statistical learning (SL) has emerged as a strong factor in biasing visuospatial attention, so that target selection is improved at frequently attended locations and distractor filtering is facilitated at frequently suppressed locations. Although these mechanisms have been consistently described in younger adults, similar evidence in healthy aging is scarce. Therefore, we studied the learning and persistence of SL of target selection and distractor suppression in younger and older adults in visual search tasks where the frequency of target (Experiment 1) or distractor (Experiment 2) was biased across spatial locations. The results show that SL of target selection was preserved in the older adults so, similar to their younger counterparts, they showed a strong and persistent advantage in target selection at locations more frequently attended. However, unlike young adults, they did not benefit from implicit SL of distractor suppression, so that distractor interference was maintained throughout the experiment independently of the contingencies associated with distractor locations. Taken together, these results provide novel evidence of distinct developmental patterns for SL of task-relevant and task-irrelevant visual information, likely reflecting differences in the implementation of proactive suppression attentional mechanisms between younger and older adults.
... In addition, we aimed to explore the distinct role of controlled or spontaneous processing in insight problem solving. This has been supported by abundant neuroscientific evidence in creative thinking (Amer et al., 2016;Mok, 2014;Marron et al., 2020;Xie et al., 2021). For example, a recent neuroscience review demonstrated that idea generation was always associated with default network activation and idea selection was more related to executive network involvement (Amer et al., 2016). ...
... This has been supported by abundant neuroscientific evidence in creative thinking (Amer et al., 2016;Mok, 2014;Marron et al., 2020;Xie et al., 2021). For example, a recent neuroscience review demonstrated that idea generation was always associated with default network activation and idea selection was more related to executive network involvement (Amer et al., 2016). Within the executive control network, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is considered to support working memory and control attention in cognitive control tasks, such as creative idea processing (Dietrich, 2004;Miller & Cohen, 2001). ...
Article
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Cognitive control is a key factor in insight generation. However, the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the generation of insight for different cognitive control remain poorly understood. This study developed a parametric fMRI design, wherein hints for solving Chinese idiom riddles were gradually provided in a stepwise manner (from the first hint, H1, to the final hint, H4). By classifying the step-specific items solved in different hint-uncovering steps/conditions, we could identify insightful responses for different levels of spontaneous or controlled processing. At the behavioral level, the number of insightful problem solving trials reached the maximum at a intermediate level of the cognitively controlled processing and the spontaneously idea generating in H3, while the bilateral insular cortex and thalamus showed the robust engagement, implying the function of these regions in making the optimal balance between external hint processing and internal generated ideas. In addition, we identified brain areas, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), angular gyrus (AG), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), and precuneus (PreC), whose activities were parametrically increased with the levels of controlled (from H1 to H4) insightful processing which were increasingly produced by the sequentially revealed hints. Further representational similarity analysis (RSA) found that spontaneous processing in insight featured greater within-condition representational variabilities in widely distributed regions in the executive, salience, and default networks. Altogether, the present study provided new evidence for the relationship between the process of cognitive control and that of spontaneous idea generation in insight problem solving and demystified the function of the insula and thalamus as an interactive interface for the optimal balance of these two processes.
... It is unknown, however, whether appearance still influences social decisions when the decision-maker has had a previous interaction with that partner. We expected that older adults might rely on facial appearances more in their decisions, consistent with their inability to inhibit automatic processes and irrelevant information (29)(30)(31) and with their increased reliance on stereotypes in other contexts (32)(33)(34). ...
... Older adults were more likely to use those spontaneous first impressions to make their choices. This is in line with research showing that older adults use schemas more (39)(40)(41) and mentalize less (42) when making social judgments, and they are less able to inhibit preexisting stereotypes and automatic processes (29)(30)(31)(32)(33). This result also corroborates previous research (11,34) showing that older adults are more trusting of others both when trust cues are reliable (e.g., past behavior) and when they are unreliable (e.g., facial appearance). ...
Article
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Older adults are frequent targets and victims of financial fraud. They may be especially susceptible to revictimization because of age-related changes in both episodic memory and social motivation. Here we examined these factors in a context where adaptive social decision-making requires intact associative memory for previous social interactions. Older adults made more maladaptive episodic memory-guided social decisions but not only because of poorer associative memory. Older adults were biased toward remembering people as being fair, while young adults were biased toward remembering people as being unfair. Holding memory constant, older adults engaged more with people that were familiar (regardless of the nature of the previous interaction), whereas young adults were prone to avoiding others that they remembered as being unfair. Finally, older adults were more influenced by facial appearances, choosing to interact with social partners that looked more generous, even though those perceptions were inconsistent with prior experience.
... They explained the effect as being due to difficulty inhibiting irrelevant information. In general, reducing distraction enhances performance in a wide variety of cognitive tasks (for a review, see Amer et al., 2016). According to a recent review by (Campbell et al. 2020), although they can be moderated by various factors (e.g., motivation and time of testing), age-related differences in inhibition are now wellestablished. ...
... Importantly, some reviews have tackled the role of distraction when evaluating episodic memory. For example, Amer et al. (2016) described cognitive control as a "double-edged sword" in ageing, since reduced cognitive control leads to greater attention to distractions in the environment and can enhance performance when distractors are relevant (see also Brédart, 2019). Along those lines, several studies have explicitly investigated the impact of relevant distractors on memory performance and have provided evidence of the specific boosting effects of distraction on cognition (Campbell et al., 2020). ...
Article
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Healthy ageing is characterized by changes in several cognitive functions, including episodic memory and inhibition. While the age-related decrease in the ability to inhibit irrelevant stimuli is often associated with lower performance, especially in episodic memory, some studies have highlighted the boosting effect of distraction in several tasks in older adults, including episodic memory tasks related to recollection. The aim of this article is to review and compare previous studies according to specific study features and to consider the results in light of the dual-process model of recollection and familiarity that were used by the authors of the reviewed articles. This work led to the identification of two major points of comparison between the studies: the timeline of the distraction intervention and the implicit nature of the processes at play, which both allowed for different implications to the relationship with recollection. The use of distraction in memory tasks can enhance episodic memory, and especially recollective processes, due to specific actions at encoding and retrieval. These findings open the door to further investigations but also raise several questions concerning the role of implicit processes and the negative impact of distraction, for example. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
... Studies of rsfMRI connectivity have found that age-related decreases in cognitive task performance were associated with reduced anticorrelation between the dorsal attention network (DAN) and default mode network (DMN), possibly as a consequence of disrupted frontoparietal network (FPN) engagement (Esposito et al., 2018;Avelar-Pereira, Bäckman, Wåhlin, Nyberg, & Salami, 2017;Dixon et al., 2017;Amer, Campbell, & Hasher, 2016;Grady, Sarraf, Saverino, & Campbell, 2016;Spreng, Stevens, Viviano, & Schacter, 2016;Prakash, Heo, Voss, Patterson, & Kramer, 2012;Sala-Llonch et al., 2012;Fox et al., 2005). More generally, aging has also been correlated with increased connectivity between networks (i.e., network integration) and decreased connectivity within networks (i.e., network segregation; Damoiseaux, 2017;Chan, Park, Savalia, Petersen, & Wig, 2014). ...
... We then repeated this analysis after disaggregating the data by self-reported sex to investigate whether both sexes exhibited similar age-and performance-related patterns of connectivity. We hypothesized that age would be correlated with decreased connectivity between DAN and FPN and increased connectivity between DAN and DMN, and memory performance would exhibit the opposite patterns of network associations (Esposito et al., 2018;Avelar-Pereira et al., 2017;Dixon et al., 2017;Amer et al., 2016;Grady et al., 2016;Spreng et al., 2016;Prakash et al., 2012;Sala-Llonch et al., 2012;Turner & Spreng, 2012;Fox et al., 2005). Based on prior activation analyses of sex differences in the effect of age and memory accuracy on task-related brain activity across the adult lifespan (Subramaniapillai et al., 2019), we hypothesized that both sexes will exhibit similar patterns of performance-related functional connectivity at encoding, but not retrieval. ...
Article
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Aging is associated with episodic memory decline and changes in functional brain connectivity. Understanding whether and how biological sex influences age- and memory performance-related functional connectivity has important theoretical implications for the cognitive neuroscience of memory and aging. Here, we scanned 161 healthy adults between 19 and 76 years of age in an event-related fMRI study of face–location spatial context memory. Adults were scanned while performing easy and difficult versions of the task at both encoding and retrieval. We used multivariate whole-brain partial least squares connectivity to test the hypothesis that there are sex differences in age- and episodic memory performance-related functional connectivity. We examined how individual differences in age and retrieval accuracy correlated with task-related connectivity. We then repeated this analysis after disaggregating the data by self-reported sex. We found that increased encoding and retrieval-related connectivity within the dorsal attention network (DAN), and between DAN and frontoparietal network and visual networks, were positively correlated to retrieval accuracy and negatively correlated with age in both sexes. We also observed sex differences in age- and performance-related functional connectivity: (a) Greater between-networks integration was apparent at both levels of task difficulty in women only, and (b) increased DAN–default mode network connectivity with age was observed in men and was correlated with poorer memory performance. Therefore, the neural correlates of age-related episodic memory decline differ in women and men and have important theoretical and clinical implications for the cognitive neuroscience of memory, aging, and dementia prevention.
... The presence of task-irrelevant information can hinder children's learning in laboratory and educational settings, particularly for those with poorer attention skills who have more difficulty ignoring these distractions (e.g., Dixon et al., 2012;Fisher et al., 2014;Hanley et al., 2017;Kannass & Colombo, 2007;Wyss et al., 2013). However, attending to contextual information that is related to task goals can also benefit learning (Ackerman, 1990;Amer et al., 2016). Yet, most research examining the effects of contextual information on children's learning in educational settings has focused primarily on task-irrelevant stimuli, even though instructors often use classroom visual aids to enhance students' learning (Almeda et al., 2014). ...
... Multiple studies have shown that older adults' more distributed attention to competing, nontarget information can benefit learning when the information is relevant for a learning task (see Amer et al., 2016;Campbell et al., 2020 for review). Young children also distribute attention more broadly due to immature selective attention skills, which may support more effective learning from both target and nontarget information (Deng & Sloutsky, 2015Plebanek & Sloutsky, 2017). ...
Article
Attending to distracting or competing information is typically considered detrimental to learning, but the presence of competing information can also facilitate learning when it is relevant to ongoing task goals. Educational settings often contain contextual elements such as classroom decorations or visual aids to enhance student learning. Despite this, most research examining effects of contextual information on children's learning has only utilized lesson‐irrelevant stimuli. While this research has shown that increased looking to task‐irrelevant information hinders learning, the extent to which looking to lesson‐relevant information can benefit children's learning is unknown. We addressed this question by examining 3‐ to 5‐year‐old children's attention to and learning from lesson‐relevant contextual information. We recorded children's eye movements as they viewed video science lessons while lesson‐relevant and ‐irrelevant images appeared in the periphery. We assessed learning based on improvements in content knowledge following the video lessons and separately measured selective attention skills using the Track‐It task (Fisher et al., 2013). Children overall spent more time looking at lesson‐relevant versus ‐irrelevant images, and those with more initial knowledge of the lesson topics or more advanced selective attention skills showed increased preferential looking to the relevant images. This increased preferential looking to lesson‐relevant images related to more effective learning during trials in which both relevant and irrelevant images were present. These results suggest that the effects of competing contextual information on early learning depend on the relationship between information content and task goals, as well as children's ability to actively select task‐relevant information from their environment. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
... These findings indicated that IG, IE, PU/RIG/RIE triggered cognitive control with the lowest to the highest intensities, respectively. Higher cognitive control is beneficial to goal-directed contexts, whereas lower cognitive control is helpful to learning and creative problem-solving contexts 93 . The heightened cognitive control in the PU/RIG/RIE group may result from ignoring distractors in the reading activity, which could improve reading speed and comprehension 94,95 . ...
... Furthermore, the lowest cognitive control was associated with IG compared to IE and PU/RIG/RIE. IG is typically viewed as a mixed process between self-generated and task-initiated thoughts 93 . A study of the role of inhibition in creativity revealed that lower cognitive control enhanced the frequency and originality of ideas 97 . ...
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Design is a ubiquitous, complex, and open-ended creation behaviour that triggers creativity. The brain dynamics underlying design is unclear, since a design process consists of many basic cognitive behaviours, such as problem understanding, idea generation, idea analysis, idea evaluation, and idea evolution. In this present study, we simulated the design process in a loosely controlled setting, aiming to quantify the design-related cognitive workload and control, identify EEG-defined large-scale brain networks, and uncover their temporal dynamics. The effectiveness of this loosely controlled setting was tested through comparing the results with validated findings available in the literature. Task-related power (TRP) analysis of delta, theta, alpha and beta frequency bands revealed that idea generation was associated with the highest cognitive workload and lowest cognitive control, compared to other design activities in the experiment, including problem understanding, idea evaluation, and self-rating. EEG microstate analysis supported this finding as microstate class C, being negatively associated with the cognitive control network, was the most prevalent in idea generation. Furthermore, EEG microstate sequence analysis demonstrated that idea generation was consistently associated with the shortest temporal correlation times concerning finite entropy rate, autoinformation function, and Hurst exponent. This finding suggests that during idea generation the interplay of functional brain networks is less restricted and the brain has more degrees of freedom in choosing the next network configuration than during other design activities. Taken together, the TRP and EEG microstate results lead to the conclusion that idea generation is associated with the highest cognitive workload and lowest cognitive control during open-ended creation task.
... Young children's broader attention may have allowed them to more quickly shift to learning about the previously irrelevant feature when it became meaningful for the ongoing task (Blanco & Sloutsky, 2019). Additional work has shown similar beneficial effects of broadly distributing attention on the ability to learn from relevant competing information in both infancy (C. A. Best et al., 2013) and in older adulthood (Amer et al., 2016;Weeks & Hasher, 2014). Taken together, these findings suggest that younger children are more likely to attend to competing information, rather than focusing narrowly on task-relevant targets, and that this broader attention to competing information may be especially beneficial for learning when the content is relevant to an ongoing task. ...
... As described above, the benefits of ignoring task-irrelevant competing information for learning have been observed in a range of learning tasks and environments, including controlled laboratory tasks, formal classrooms, computerbased lessons, and specific learning materials. To date, researchers have relied on a narrower range of tasks to demonstrate that attending to task-relevant competing information can facilitate children's learning, although work with older adults has identified this benefit across multiple paradigms (e.g., Amer et al., 2016;Weeks & Hasher, 2014). Future research can investigate whether there are differential impacts of task-relevant and -irrelevant sources of competing information across varying learning environments and tasks. ...
Article
Attention control regulates efficient processing of goal‐relevant information by suppressing interference from irrelevant competing inputs while also flexibly allocating attention across relevant inputs according to task demands. Research has established that developing attention control skills promote effective learning by minimizing distractions from task‐irrelevant competing information. Additional research also suggests that competing contextual information can provide meaningful input for learning and should not always be ignored. Instead, attending to competing information that is relevant to task goals can facilitate and broaden the scope of children's learning. We review this past research examining effects of attending to task‐relevant and task‐irrelevant competing information on learning outcomes, focusing on relations between visual attention and learning in childhood. We then present a synthesis argument that complex interactions across learning goals, the contexts of learning environments and tasks, and developing attention control mechanisms will determine whether attending to competing information helps or hinders learning. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Attention Psychology > Learning Psychology > Development and Aging
... Such improvements in trainees' cognitive control were also supported by the significant increases in theta band power from the Training stage to PracticeA stage (over central, temporal, parietal, and occipital sites ) and the significant theta increases from the Training stage to PracticeB stage (over frontal, central, and temporal sites), among the limited significant changes observed in STAGE comparisons. As indicated by the entropy rate, the improvements in cognitive control from PracticeA stage to PracticeB stage could be explained from the skill acquisition point of view, which may contribute to a broad set of cognitive functions that were improved after repeated practice 73,74 . This also aligns with the insight from the study 71 , as cognitive control decreases during uncertain conditions (Training stage), then recovers as trainees become more familiar with the tasks and their requirements from PracticeA to PracticeB. ...
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The objective of pilot training is to equip trainees with the knowledge, judgment, and skills to maintain control of an aircraft and respond to critical flight tasks. The present research aims to investigate changes in trainees’ cognitive control levels during a pilot training process while they underwent basic flight maneuvers. EEG microstate analysis was applied together with spectral power features to quantitatively monitor trainees’ cognitive control under varied flight tasks during different training sessions on a flight simulator. Not only could EEG data provide an objective measure of cognitive control to complement the current subjective assessments, but the application of EEG microstate analysis is particularly well-suited for capturing rapid dynamic changes in cognitive states that may happen under complex human activities in conducting flight maneuvers. Comparisons were conducted between two types of tasks and across different training stages to monitor how pilot trainees’ cognitive control responds to varied flight task types and training stages. The present research provides insights into the changes in trainees’ cognitive control during a pilot training process and highlights the potential of EEG microstate analysis for monitoring cognitive control.
... An important question is whether the relationship between the severity of language impairment and the neuroplastic mechanisms involved in language recovery really follows such a simple logic of a linear increase in contribution as proposed in the framework: For example, one might expect that even minimal damage and mild impairments (temporarily) recruit cognitive control processes, which in turn facilitate Hebbian pathways in the language network. This idea aligns with the observation that most tasks in everyday life involve some form of cognitive control and attentional processes (Amer et al., 2016;Fedorenko, 2014). Nonetheless, their interaction with the domain-specific language network, and thus the potential for recovery of language functions, is likely to become less efficient with larger lesions. ...
... Finally, our result points to the potential that cognitive control is not always positive in facilitating task performance. As proposed by Amer et al. (2016), reduced cognitive control (inhibition) enhances performance of old and sometimes young adults under some circumstances, which may partly explain the unexpected result of our study. investigated whether variation across individual, interpersonal, ecological, and societal-level factors impacted on multiple dimensions of cognitive control. ...
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Although investigations of bilingual effects on cognitive control have proliferated in recent years, results remain inconsistent. A prevailing explanation for these mixed results lies in the ignorance of the complex, multidimensional nature of bilingualism across previous studies. To address this issue, the present study examines bilingual effects from a holistic perspective, accounting for multiple levels of linguistic and non-linguistic factors including individual, interpersonal, social, and ecological. 148 undergraduate Mandarin-English bilinguals were asked to complete the Flanker task and Wisconsin Card Sorting Test to measure conflict monitoring, inhibition, and mental set shifting. Linguistic and non-linguistic characteristics were assessed through questionnaires and interview. Results of stepwise multiple regression analyses revealed that years of English use predicted conflict monitoring, English proficiency predicted conflict monitoring and inhibition, and English-speaking time in class predicted mental set shifting. These results support that factors at multiple levels impact differently on separate dimensions of cognitive control, highlighting a need to better measure and account for linguistic and non-linguistic variability in bilingual samples.
... The expression of life history strategies (fast or slow) in adulthood is contingent on the level of external threats. That is, behavioral strategies learned in childhood can be carried over into adulthood and easily activated when facing threats and challenging situations (Amer, Campbell, & Hasher, 2016). However, such differences cannot be detected in benign and non-threatening conditions that do not trigger the sensitized responses programmed in early childhood. ...
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From the perspective of survival adaption, adverse childhood experiences may promote creativity, and this effect would be enhanced by external threat. This study adopted three approaches to explore the impact of adverse childhood experiences on creativity. By using a historiometric approach to investigate the adverse childhood experiences among eminent psychologists in 20th century, Study 1 found that the proportion experiencing childhood adversity was significantly higher than the proportion who did not, especially in the group experiencing an external threat. Study 2 measured college students’ early childhood experiences and divergent thinking in a threatening circumstance (COVID-19 pandemic), which showed that harshness in early childhood was significantly correlated with the originality of divergent thinking. Study 3 explored the moderating role of threat through experimental manipulation. Results showed that harshness predicted originality only in the threatening condition but not in the control condition. These results have theoretical significance for understanding individual creative development.
... Reduced control can be beneficial for certain cognitive processes and stages (cf. Chrysikou et al., 2014), although it clearly seems inappropriate to claim that creativity generally benefits from reduced cognitive control (see Amer, Campbell, & Hasher, 2016). Some tasks can be well achieved by Type 1 processes (e.g., producing multiple associations) but many can only be achieved by Type 2 processes (e.g., evaluation of ideas with respect to task goals). ...
... In some cases, when attentional resources are depleted or deficient, distracting information may not be sufficiently suppressed, resulting in that information being encoded to memory (Amer et al., 2016). For example, research with older adults -a population whose cognitive deficits can be partly explained by age-related changes in attentional control (Hasher et al., 1999;Lustig et al., 2007) -has shown that when task-irrelevant information cannot be adequately suppressed, it can become erroneously bound to task-relevant information and stored in long-term memory, ultimately influencing later behaviour . ...
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Hyper-binding – the erroneous encoding of target and distractor information into associative pairs in memory – has been described as a unique age effect caused by declines in attentional control. Previous work has found that, on average, young adults do not hyper-bind. However, if hyper-binding is caused by reduced attentional control, then young adults with poor attention regulation should also show evidence of hyper-binding. We tested this question with an individual differences approach, using a battery of attentional control tasks and relating this to individual differences in hyper-binding. Participants (N = 121) completed an implicit associative memory test measuring memory for both target-distractor (i.e., hyper-binding) and target-target pairs, followed by a series of tasks measuring attentional control. Our results show that on average, young adults do not hyper-bind, but as predicted, those with poor attentional control show a larger hyper-binding effect than those with good attentional control. Exploratory analyses also suggest that individual differences in attentional control relate to susceptibility to interference at retrieval. These results support the hypothesis that hyper-binding in older adults is due to age-related declines in attentional control, and demonstrate that hyper-binding may be an issue for any individual with poor attentional control, regardless of age.
... On the other hand, middle-aged and older adults may be less susceptible to social context than younger adults. Despite cognitive control declines with age (Amer et al., 2016;Braver & Barch, 2002), emotional control and emotional stability has been shown to increase with age (Burr et al., 2021;Carstensen et al., 2011Carstensen et al., , 2020Urry & Gross, 2010). SST might also predict that an increased focus on maximizing well-being in general might lead middle-aged and older adults to better resist social influence. ...
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Developmental literature suggests that susceptibility to social conformity pressure peaks in adolescence and disappears with maturity into early adulthood. Predictions about these behaviors are less clear for middle-aged and older adults. On the one hand, while age-related increases in prioritization of socioemotional goals might predict greater susceptibility to social conformity pressures, aging is also associated with enhanced emotion regulation that could support resistance to conformity pressures. In this exploratory research study, we used mobile experience sampling surveys to naturalistically track how 157 healthy adults between the ages of 18 and 80 practice self-control over spontaneous desires in daily life. Many of these desires were experienced in the presence of others enacting that desire. Results showed that middle-aged and older adults were better at controlling their desires than younger adults when desires were experienced in the presence of others enacting that desire. Consistent with the literature on improved emotion regulation with age, these results provide evidence that the ability to resist social conformity pressure is enhanced across the adult life span.
... Finally, older adults exhibit a decline in their ability to ignore irrelevant information or inhibit impulses to focus on relevant information (Hasher and Zacks, 1988;Reuter-Lorenz et al., 2021). Age has also been associated with retaining information that is no longer task relevant, which can hinder or benefit performance depending on the task (Amer et al., 2016(Amer et al., , 2022. Inefficient inhibitory control leads to more distractibility and decreased attentional control. ...
Article
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Cognitive control is one of the most fundamental aspects of human life. Its ageing is an important contemporary research area due to the needs of the growing ageing population, such as prolonged independence and quality of life. Traditional ageing research argued for a global decline in cognitive control with age, typically characterised by slowing processing speed and driven by changes in the frontal cortex. However, recent advances questioned this perspective by demonstrating high heterogeneity in the ageing data, domain-specific declines, activity changes in resting state networks, and increased functional connectivity. Moreover, improvements in neuroimaging techniques have enabled researchers to develop compensatory models of neural reorganisation that helps negate the effects of neural losses and promote cognitive control. In this article on typical ageing, we review recent behavioural and neural findings related to the decline in cognitive control among older adults. We begin by reviewing traditional perspectives and continue with how recent work challenged those perspectives. In the discussion section, we propose key areas of focus for future research in the field.
... The increased accuracy associated with increased boundary separations (i.e., increased accumulation of evidence before a response) could be viewed from the perspective of the positive byproduct of enhanced processing of interference rather than caution. Indeed, the positive effects of processing interference on accuracy have been found in several studies on interference and aging (e.g., Amer et al., 2016;Campbell et al., 2012;Chang et al., 2014;Hasher & Zacks, 1988;Healey et al., 2008;Rowe et al., 2006;Weeks & Hasher, 2014). Future DDM studies into cognition and aging could potentially consider how difficulties inhibiting interference impacts on the cognitive processes under investigation and whether the concept of caution is applicable. ...
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Objective: Diffusion decision modeling (DDM) is a validated cognitive modeling method that has been used to provide insights into why older adults are slower than younger adults on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. DDM results have shown that increased processing time, caution, and sensorimotor factors have explained most of this slowing. Enhanced attentional processing of irrelevant information by older adults has also been reported in DDM studies but not explicitly studied. This enhanced processing of interference has been attributed to a motivational goal-directed decision to minimize errors by increasing accumulation of information (i.e., caution) rather than neurocognitive changes associated with aging. No DDM study has explicitly investigated interference and aging by comparing single task and dual performance within the framework of attentional control to explore more fully what and how attentional processes are involved. Our study attempts to fill these gaps. Method: We used a choice response time (RT) task of attentional switching with and without interference and applied the EZ-diffusion model on the data of 117 healthy younger and older adults aged 18–87. Results: Repeated mixed-measures analyses of variance of DDM parameters found that longer nondecision time was the main driver for longer RTs for older adults on both attentional switch tasks, but more prominently on the attentional switch trials of the dual task. Conclusions: Processing interference before the decision to switch attention was the main driver of increased RTs for older adults. Rather than motivational goal-directed factors for error minimization (i.e., caution), findings supported neurocognitive and inhibition deficit explanations. Future DDM studies into cognition and aging could consider how difficulties inhibiting interference impacts on the cognitive processes under investigation and whether the concept of caution is applicable. Findings raise functional considerations for older adults on visually oriented tasks that require attentional switching (e.g., work vs. driving).
... Across two studies, we show that event distinctiveness (i.e., the within > between cued-recall effect) relates to better overall memory for the movie in older adults. While inferring connections between events is naturally important in forming coherent narrative representations in memory (e.g., Stine- Morrow & McCall, 2022), and this may be one of the hidden benefits of reduced inhibitory control with age (Amer et al., 2016), cross-event associations may also contribute to disordered recall and memory failures (Diamond & Levine, 2020). Encoding distinct events into memory may be particularly important for older adults, as attentional control is also required to resolve interference and guide search processes at retrieval (Healey et al., 2013;Jacoby et al., 2005). ...
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We experience the world as a continuous flow of information but segment it into discrete events in long-term memory. As a result, younger adults are more likely to recall details of an event when cued with information from the same event (within-event cues) than from the prior event (between-event cues), suggesting that stronger associations are formed within events than across event boundaries. The present study aimed to investigate the effects of age and working memory updating on this within > between cued-recall effect and the consequences for subsequent memory. Across two studies, participants viewed two different films (Hitchcock's Bang You're Dead and BBC's Sherlock). They were later shown clips taken from either the beginning/middle (within-event cues) or end (between-event cues) of a scene and asked to recall what happened next in the film. While the main effect of age was not significant in either experiment, overall memory performance related to the within > between effect in older, but not younger, adults. Low-performing older adults showed less of a difference in cued recall for within- and between-event cues than high performers. In Study 2, better two-back task performance also related to a greater within > between effect in older, but not younger, adults, suggesting that working memory updating relates to the distinctiveness of events stored in long-term memory, at least in older adults. Taken together, these findings suggest that age differences in event memory are not inevitable and may critically depend on one's ability update working memory at event boundaries. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
... In the original Autobiographical Interview study (Levine et al., 2002), older adults showed reduced production of internal details for autobiographical events selected from five periods across the life span, replicating age-related effects on contextual recall (e.g., McIntyre & Craik, 1987). Older adults also produced more external details relative to younger adults, consistent with the notion that they have trouble suppressing off-target information during recall (Arbuckle & Gold, 1993;Hasher & Zacks, 1988) potentially due to impaired cognitive control capacity (Amer et al., 2016). Alternatively, external detail production may be due to compensation for reduced internal detail production (Devitt et al., 2017; but see Grilli & Sheldon, 2022). ...
Article
Objective: A meta-analytic review was conducted to assess the effects of healthy aging, amnestic Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's Disease (AD) on naturalistic autobiographical memory using the Autobiographical Interview, a widely used, standardized assessment that derives measures of internal (episodic) and external (non-episodic) details from freely recalled autobiographical narratives. Method: A comprehensive literature search identified 21 aging, 6 MCI, and 7 AD studies (total N =1556 participants). Summary statistics for internal and external details for each comparison (younger vs. older or MCI/AD vs. age-matched comparison groups) and effect size statistics were extracted and summarized using Hedges' g (random effects model) and adjusted for the presence of publication bias. Results: The pattern of reduced internal and elevated external details in aging was robust and consistent across nearly all 21 studies. MCI and - to a greater extent - AD were associated with reduced internal details, whereas the external detail elevation faded with MCI and AD. Although there was evidence of publication bias on reporting of internal detail effects, these effects remained robust after correction. Discussion: The canonical changes to episodic memory observed in aging and neurodegenerative disease are mirrored in the free recall of real-life events. Our findings indicate that the onset of neuropathology overwhelms the capacity of older adults to draw upon distributed neural systems to elaborate on past experiences, including both episodic details specific to identified events and non-episodic content characteristic of healthy older adults' autobiographical narratives.
... The pedagogical goal of the English course was to improve learners' English proficiency in terms of speaking, reading, and writing, by studying textbook units, and by participating in different speaking activities. The instructed English course was designed to cater to the older adult population and their needs, which is important for fostering high motivation levels (Alvarado Cantero, 2008), and was based on various principles grounded in adult education (see, e.g., Amer et al., 2016;Knowles et al., 2011;Ramírez Gómez, 2016). Classroom activities included individual, partner and group work, and teacher-fronted explanations. ...
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This longitudinal study with time-serial data examines for the first time whether different types of intraindividual variation in second language (L2) performance and cognitive functioning are related, and how and when they influence L2 development longitudinally in older adulthood. We analyzed the L2 development of 26 German-speaking adults aged 62–79 who were taught L2 English for 2 × 90 minutes per week over 6 months. At each of the 15 measurements, the participants completed three L2 tasks and eight cognitive measures, and they answered open-ended questions about socioaffective variables such as L2 motivation. Results of generalized additive mixed models and qualitative content analyses showed, inter alia , that L2 variability—rather than inconsistency or dispersion—had a (nonlinear) effect on L2 growth, being especially large during periods of rapid development. The qualitative analyses revealed a blended operation of internal and external states being associated with periods of significant L2 growth.
... At the same time, older adults feature an extremely extensive vocabulary, as vocabulary size increases over the life span (Glisky, 2007;Gollan & Goldrick, 2019). They also exhibit advanced lexical sophistication and semantic expertise (Spreng & Turner, 2019), deeply relying on crystallized knowledge (Rabaglia & Salthouse, 2011), which is argued to compensate for reduced cognitive control observed in ageing (Amer et al., 2016). ...
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Objective: In this article, we reexamine the hypothesis of language retrogenesis, that is, the assumption that language change over healthy ageing mirrors, albeit inversely, language acquisition by the child. We additionally question whether this inverse pattern can as well be observed at the cognitive and neurobiological levels, and whether it can be informative (and a consequence, in fact) of how language evolved in humans. Method: We compare the language strengths and weaknesses signifying language acquisition and its eventual decay in healthy ageing. We further compare age-related cognitive and neurobiological readjustments during each of these two developmental stages, with a focus on brain areas involved in language processing. Finally, we delve into the evolutionary changes experienced by these areas. Results: We present evidence supporting the hypothesis of retrogenesis in two domains of language: the lexicon (lexical access, understanding of nonliteral meanings, and resolution of lexical competition) and syntax (understanding and production of complex sentences). Additionally, we show evidence that the brain areas supporting these complex tasks are late-myelinated in childhood and early-demyelinated during ageing. Finally, we show that some of these areas (such as the inferior frontal gyrus) are phylogenetically newer. Conclusions: Language acquisition in children and language degradation/loss in healthy ageing follow the principle of retrogenesis, but mostly in domains that are cognitively demanding and that depend on recently evolved brain devices. Putting this differently, the components of language that emerged more recently appear to be more, and earlier, affected during ageing, as well as developed later over childhood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
... An intriguing alternative, however, is that lapses have unexpected benefits. One possible benefit is that they broaden the focus of our minds to support learning of that which is peripheral to the task at hand (see Amer et al., 2016;Thompson-Schill et al., 2009 for related arguments). Unfortunately, most sustained attention studies do not measure learning, let alone for content that is not strictly goal-relevant, leaving us to wonder whether there may be some benefit to this otherwise limiting aspect of human cognition. ...
Article
Attentional lapses have been found to impair everything from basic perception to learning and memory. Yet, despite the well-documented costs of lapses on cognition, recent work suggests that lapses might unexpectedly confer some benefits. One potential benefit is that lapses broaden our learning to integrate seemingly irrelevant content that could later prove useful-a benefit that prior research focusing only on goal-relevant memory would miss. Here, we measure how fluctuations in sustained attention influence the learning of seemingly goal-irrelevant content that competes for attention with target content. Participants completed a correlated flanker task in which they categorized central targets (letters or numbers) while ignoring peripheral flanking symbols that shared hidden probabilistic relationships with the targets. We found that across participants, higher rates of attentional lapses correlated with greater learning of the target-flanker relationships. Moreover, within participants, learning was more evident during attentional lapses. These findings address long-standing theoretical debates and reveal a benefit of attentional lapses: they expand the scope of learning and decisions beyond the strictly relevant.
... Moreover, there is a clear lack of research is a variety of cognitive domains and tasks that needs to be addressed. On top of that, we suggest that future research ventures beyond the analysis of cognitive tasks based on their content (e.g., verbal or non-verbal materials) and considers the level of cognitive control required to perform the cognitive processes involved in those tasks (some tasks benefit from high-level cognitive control whereas some benefit from a more relaxed cognitive state; Amer et al., 2016). Correspondingly, the potential evaluations could be (1) whether different types of BgM would differentially affect tasks that demand high and low cognitive control, and (2) whether there are multiplicative interactions among the types of music, types of tasks, as well as the level of cognitive control required by those tasks on performance. ...
Article
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Research on the effect of background music (BgM) on cognitive task performance is marked by inconsistent methods and inconclusive findings. In order to provide clarity to this area, we performed a systematic review on the impact of BgM on performances in a variety of tasks whilst considering the contributions of various task, music, and population characteristics. Following the PRISMA and SWiM protocols, we identified 95 articles (154 experiments) that comprise cognitive tasks across six different cognitive domains—memory; language; thinking, reasoning, and problem-solving; inhibition; attention and processing speed. Extracted data were synthesized using vote counting based (solely) on the direction of effects and analyzed using a sign test analysis. Overall, our results demonstrate a general detrimental effect of BgM on memory and language-related tasks, and a tendency for BgM with lyrics to be more detrimental than instrumental BgM. Only one positive effect (of instrumental BgM) was found; and in most cases, we did not find any effect of BgM on task performance. We also identified a general detrimental impact of BgM towards difficult (but not easy) tasks; and towards introverts (but not extraverts). Taken together, our results show that task, music, and population-specific analyses are all necessary when studying the effects of BgM on cognitive task performance. They also call attention to the necessity to control for task difficulty as well as individual differences (especially level of extraversion) in empirical studies. Finally, our results also demonstrate that many areas remain understudied and therefore a lot more work still needs to be done to gain a comprehensive understanding of how BgM impacts cognitive task performance.
... Imagining highly unfamiliar scenarios has been shown to increase task demands by requiring individuals to access disparate, unrelated sources of information (Robin & Moscovitch, 2014;Weiler et al., 2010). Given that cognitive control is known to decline with age (e.g., Amer et al., 2016), the increased combinatorial demands of imagining unfamiliar, COVID-related helping scenarios may prove challenging for older adults. Thus, we might expect an age-related decline in the ability to simulate helping in novel, COVID-related scenarios. ...
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General Audience Summary Since late 2019, news outlets and social media platforms have shown examples of people in need amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Across a series of studies, we examine whether people are more willing to help others in need after imagining a scenario in which they help the other person, compared to when they passively read the same story. Specifically, we examined whether imagining helping scenarios increase younger and older adults’ willingness to help in novel scenarios posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Across three studies, we found that imagining helping others in need increases one’s willingness to help during both everyday and COVID-related scenarios of people in need. Further, we show that imagining helping increases emotional concern, scene imagery (i.e., vividness of a scene), and theory of mind (i.e., perspective-taking), all of which are related to participants’ willingness to help those in need. In Studies 2 and 3, we found that people produce richer, more event-related details when imagining everyday scenarios, but more basic, factual details for COVID-related scenarios. This suggests that people may use memories of similar past events to help imagine familiar scenarios and rely more on factual knowledge when imagining more novel or unfamiliar scenarios. These findings suggest that encouraging audiences to engage with stories of people in need by imagining helping can increase willingness to help during the pandemic.
... Regarding the top-down explanation, research indicates that top-down processing is impaired in older adults (e.g., Amer et al., 2016;Braver & Barch, 2002;Lee et al., 2012). Furthermore, this impairment has been found to impact performance on tests of episodic and autobiographical episodic memory (e.g., Piolino et al., 2010). ...
Article
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Research has demonstrated that performing a sequence of saccadic horizontal eye movements prior to retrieval facilitates performance on tests of episodic memory. This has been observed in both laboratory tasks of retention and autobiographical memory. To date, the work has centred on performance in younger individuals. This paper extends previous investigations by examining the effects of saccadic eye movements in older persons. Autobiographical episodic and semantic memory fluency was assessed in younger (age range 18-35, mean = 22.50), and older (age range 55-87, mean = 70.35) participants following saccadic (vs. fixation control) manipulations. The main effects of eye movements and age were found for episodic autobiographical memory (greater fluency after eye movements and in younger participants). Semantic autobiographical memory showed a main effect of age (greater fluency in younger participants), whereas general semantic memory showed no effect of age or eye movement. These findings indicate that saccadic horizontal eye movements can enhance episodic personal memory in older individuals. This has implications as a technique to improve autobiographical recollection in the elderly and as an adjunct in reminiscence therapy.
... One prediction of R2R is that aging is associated with increases in the propensity and intensity of attention and goal-state lapses before remembering, which partially account for age-related memory decline. This prediction is consistent with known age-related differences in sustained attention [14], reactive (versus proactive) control [132], dedifferentiation of neural responses [128], motivational selectivity [137], and the representation and use of task-irrelevant goals and information [138,139]. These age-related differences may partially explain why older adults often exhibit differential declines in pattern completion-dependent episodic remembering (e.g., tests of associative versus item-based memory [140]), as well as in episodic simulation [97]. ...
Article
Learning and remembering are fundamental to our lives, so what causes us to forget? Answers often highlight preparatory processes that precede learning, as well as mnemonic processes during the act of encoding or retrieval. Importantly, evidence now indicates that preparatory processes that precede retrieval attempts also have powerful influences on memory success or failure. Here, we review recent work from neuroimaging, electroencephalography, pupillometry, and behavioral science to propose an integrative framework of retrieval-period dynamics that explains variance in remembering in the moment and across individuals as a function of interactions among preparatory attention, goal coding, and mnemonic processes. Extending this approach, we consider how a 'readiness to remember' (R2R) framework explains variance in high-level functions of memory and mnemonic disruptions in aging.
... Integrative body-mind training (IBMT): a type of effortless training that stresses no effort to control or manipulate thoughts and feelings, but emphasizes an awareness of the natural state of body and mind, and accepts whatever arises in one's awareness at Effortless training refers to practices that involve minimal mental effort or effortless experiences such as nature exposure and flow experience [6,10,[34][35][36][37]. Recent behavioral evidence indicates that reduced control and effort can enhance cognitive performance [38], suggesting promising effects of effortless training on cognition (Box 1). Effortless training changes brain and bodily states effortlessly and is different from effortful training, which involves cognitively demanding tasks or processes to achieve benefits. ...
Article
For the past 50 years, cognitive scientists have assumed that training attention and self-control must be effortful. However, growing evidence suggests promising effects of effortless training approaches such as nature exposure, flow experience, and effortless practice on attention and self-control. This opinion article focuses on effortless training of attention and self-control. We begin by introducing our definitions of effortful and effortless training and reviewing the growing literature on these two different forms of training. We then discuss the similarities and differences in their respective behavioral outcomes and neural correlates. Finally, we propose a putative neural mechanism of effortless training. We conclude by highlighting promising directions for research, development, and application of effortless training.
... Besides the critical role of cognitive control in creativity, previous studies have shown that low control processes in certain contexts may favor creativity and that the optimal level of cognitive control is task-dependent (Amer et al., 2016;Chrysikou, 2019Chrysikou, , 2018Wiley and Jarosz, 2012). To further support this idea, proposed the Matched Filter Hypothesis for cognitive control. ...
Thesis
Creativity is a high-level cognitive function at the basis of various domains of human activity. However, this human capacity, while essential to face the challenges of our society as well as our daily lives, is still poorly understood. Previous research indicates that individual differences in semantic memory structure and processes contribute to individual’s creative abilities. In this thesis, we aim to better understand the relationships between semantic memory and creativity and the underlying brain correlates. In the first part of this thesis, we performed two studies to explore how the properties of semantic memory and brain networks relate to creative behavior. First, in a behavioral study, we investigated the relationships between semantic memory organization and creative thinking. By means of network-based methods, we built individual semantic networks as a proxy of the semantic memory structure and explored their properties in relation to creative abilities. We found that individual differences in semantic network properties correlated to divergent thinking and to creative behavior in real life. Then, in a second study, we replicated these findings and explored the brain functional connectivity underlying the semantic network properties predicting real-life creativity. We found that unique brain functional connectivity patterns underlying the modularity of individual semantic networks predicted individual differences in real-life creative behavior. In the second part, we examined the cognitive processes of semantic memory search that allow higher creative abilities and explored their brain correlates. We found two components that reflected 1) attentional focus allowing persistent search behavior and 2) the flexibility in memory. The first component related to divergent thinking while the second one related to convergent creative thinking. Finally, in the last part, by means of the semantic priming approach, we explored the different types of relationships that participate in the organization of semantic memory. We specifically investigated whether the implicit retrieval of a thematic and taxonomic category is facilitated by two words belonging to this category more than by a single exemplar. We found larger and additive priming in the double priming compared to the single priming condition at the behavioral and electrophysiological level. Our findings improved the actual knowledge on the organization of semantic memory into categories and how related concepts implicitly associate to each other in memory. Altogether, these findings shed light on several neurocognitive mechanisms related to semantic memory structure and processes involved in creativity. This work may also provide new tools that could be useful in future research on creativity.
... However, it also has the cost of consuming more attentional resources and neglecting the processing of bottom-up information unrelated to the goal. In other words, too much bias toward proactive control can have the consequence of inhibiting learning and imaginative problem-solving (Amer et al., 2016). In Dohsa-hou, the client is made to exert effort toward a body movement as a targeted clinical task but is also asked to continuously monitor and flexibly modify body movements through communication with the therapist. ...
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The empirical basis for self-control in Dohsa-hou as it relates to effects on cognitive processes has been explored in a few studies of the Japanese psychotherapy, but not under standardized conditions with a strong predictive theory of control. This study reports on a series of experiments with the Dual Mechanisms of Control framework to clarify the possible regulatory mechanism of Dohsa-hou by focusing on shoulder movement, a key body movement task used by practitioners across applied settings. Cognitive control was operationalized with the AX version of Continuous Performance Test (AX-CPT) paradigm for proactive control and a modified Stroop task paradigm for reactive control in a 3-arm parallel group trial study design. Healthy Japanese university students were assigned to a Dohsa-hou group that performed a shoulder movement task for few minutes, an active control group that performed a similar task, or a passive control group comprised of a resting condition. A total of 55 participants performed the AX-CPT and 57 participants performed the modified Stroop task before and after the group manipulation. In the AX-CPT, an increase in the error rate of AY (true cue-false probe) trial from pre- to post-test was observed in the passive control group only, and found to be marginally higher in the passive control group relative to Dohsa-hou group at post-test. This indicated that Dohsa-hou moderated the activation of proactive control by repeated AX-CPT performance. The error rate of the Proactive Behavioral Index did not differ from zero at post-test only in the Dohsa-hou group, indicating flexible cognitive control. In the modified Stroop task, there was no difference between congruent and incongruent trials at post-test for the Dohsa-hou group only, indicating the facilitation of reactive control. The evidence for a balancing effect for the Dohsa-hou-based shoulder movement task indicates that clients experience a form of continuous self-monitoring, which might reduce mind-wandering from their focus on movement execution combined with iterative verbal feedback from the therapist. Overall, the results of the present study suggest that the self-regulatory mechanism promoted in clinical Dohsa-hou emphasizes guided shifts in attention to the reactive mode toward a balance of cognitive control.
... We propose that, relative to younger adults, healthy older adults (typically between 60 and 85 years of age) process and store too much information, the result of reductions in cognitive control or inhibitory mechanisms. When efficient, these mechanisms enable a focus on target or goal-relevant information to the exclusion (or suppression) of irrelevant information (Box 1) [20][21][22][23]. Due to poor control (or reduced efficiency), the mnemonic representations of older adults can include: (i) recently activated but no-longer-relevant information; (ii) task-unrelated thoughts and/or prior knowledge elicited by the target information; and/or (iii) task-irrelevant information cued by the immediate environment. ...
Article
Declines in episodic memory in older adults are typically attributed to differences in encoding strategies and/or retrieval processes. These views omit a critical factor in age-related memory differences: the nature of the representations that are formed. Here, we review evidence that older adults create more cluttered (or richer) representations of events than do younger adults. These cluttered representations might include target information along with recently activated but no-longer-relevant information, prior knowledge cued by the ongoing situation, as well as irrelevant information in the current environment. Although these representations can interfere with the retrieval of target information, they can also support other memory-dependent cognitive functions.
... Thus, the absence of stress effects on these tasks in older adults is surprising. One potential explanation is that older adults might make use of different cognitive strategies to solve PFC-dependent tasks, such as shown under normal non-stressful conditions (Amer et al., 2016;Braver et al., 2009;Paxton et al., 2008). In addition, there are reports of moderating sex effects where acute stress has been shown to attenuate cognitive flexibility in young men but not necessarily in women (Kalia et al., 2018;Shields et al., 2016b). ...
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This literature review provides the first comprehensive qualitative and quantitative systematic synthesis of acute laboratory stress effects on older adults’ cognition by specifying the direction and magnitude of those effects both overall and for different cognitive processes separately. A systematic literature search was performed, and effect sizes estimated whenever possible. We found meta-analytical evidence that stress has negative effects on older adults’ verbal fluency (gadj = -0.53 (95% CI [-2.70, 1.63]), null-to-negative effects on episodic memory (gadj = -0.26 (95% CI [-0.44, -0.08]), null effects on executive functions (gadj = 0.07 (95% CI [-0.31, 0.46]), and enhancing effects on working memory (gadj = 0.16 (95% CI [-0.01, 0.33]). Relating these findings to those in young adults, notable differences emerged for some cognitive functions, such as opposing effects on working memory between age groups. Our review further reveals that stress effects on older adults’ memory retention, associative memory, prospective memory, interference control or cognitive flexibility are heavily understudied. We provide a conceptual and methodological framework for future studies in older adults.
... Indeed, aspects of cognition that rely on noticing connections between otherwise distinct events, such as insight problem-solving in the Remote Associates Test, which involves seeking a word that connects three seemingly unrelated words, show improvements at off-peak times of day [63,64]. Consistent with theories arguing that reduced cognitive control can be adaptive [65,66], we suggest that generalization may be another instance where low inhibition is an asset [67]. Specifically, lower inhibition in the morning might facilitate the spreading of activation across different memories, making it easier to see novel connections. ...
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Extracting shared structure across our experiences allows us to generalize our knowledge to novel contexts. How do different brain states influence this ability to generalize? Using a novel category learning paradigm, we assess the effect of both sleep and time of day on generalization that depends on the flexible integration of recent information. Counter to our expectations, we found no evidence that this form of generalization is better after a night of sleep relative to a day awake. Instead, we observed an effect of time of day, with better generalization in the morning than the evening. This effect also manifested as increased false memory for generalized information. In a nap experiment, we found that generalization did not benefit from having slept recently, suggesting a role for time of day apart from sleep. In follow-up experiments, we were unable to replicate the time of day effect for reasons that may relate to changes in category structure and task engagement. Despite this lack of consistency, we found a morning benefit for generalization when analyzing all the data from experiments with matched protocols (n = 136). We suggest that a state of lowered inhibition in the morning may facilitate spreading activation between otherwise separate memories, promoting this form of generalization.
... If the student mentions she could ask her parents or her friends, then this is coded as two solutions. If a student yields a big number of solutions, this means that there is cognitive control and it reflects performance on open-ended tasks-which is an asset in stressful situations (Amer et al., 2016). 2. Effectiveness of the solution to the problem Following Richard and Dodge (1982), this category captures if the solution given by the student is effective (i.e. it exposes a realistic and plausible way of acquiring the money). ...
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Scarcity acts as a mental burden that disrupts how people process information and make decisions (Mullainathan and Shafir in Scarcity: Why having too little means so much. Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2013; Mani et al. Science 342:976–980, 2013). In this study, we replicated Mani et al.’s (Science 342:976–980, 2013) experimental design to explore whether scarcity also taxes Colombian high school students’ mental bandwidth. In a lab-in-the-field experiment, we tested how 417 high school students from high and low socioeconomic status (SES) in Bogotá, Colombia, responded to different scarcity situations. Students were first presented with hypothetical scenarios of harsh or soft scarcity. Next, participants had to solve a series of tasks that measured higher cognitive functions (i.e. Raven’s Progressive Matrices, Cognitive Reflection Task and questions to assess their Delay Discounting value) and had to explain how they would solve the scarcity situation. As opposed to Mani et al. (Science 342:976–980, 2013), we did not find that scarcity taxed individuals’ mental bandwidth, neither their cognitive nor executive functions. We found that low-SES individuals, under the harsh scarcity condition, displayed more empathic attributes than high-SES individuals. Taken together, the results of this study show the importance of replication in different cultures and environments.
... A reasonable question is whether the smaller (and nonsignificant) dominance reversal in aging should be taken as evidence of a processing deficit, or if it could instead reflect an aging-related difference in some other cognitive process. This idea is consistent with aging studies outside the domain of language which suggested that what seems to be a deficit can sometimes instead reflect a processing advantage or difference in priorities and strategic approach (e.g., Amer & Hasher, 2014;Kemper, et al., 1989;Ramscar et al., 2014; for reviews see Amer et al., 2016;Kavé & Goral, 2017). A relevant consideration here is that reversing language dominance might not be an efficient strategy for language mixing . ...
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... Moreover, these suppression effects were shown to be reliable measures of group and individual differences. Older adults, who are known to have difficulty resolving interference (e.g., Amer, Campbell & Hasher, 2016;Hasher & Zacks, 1988;Lustig, May, & Hasher, 2001), showed a smaller suppression effect than the younger adults. Even among younger adults, some individuals showed a larger suppression effect and others showed a smaller effect: those who showed a larger effect performed better on operation span, a measure of working memory capacity known to correlate with other episodic memory measures (e.g., Hertzog, Dixon, Hultsch, & MacDonald, 2003;Kane & Engle, 2000). ...
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In the context of an ageing and increasingly more independent learning population, a narrative inquiry into the life stories of motivated and still active senior language users remains a promising yet unexplored area. This case study forms part of a PhD research (Darnault, 2023) on the motivational dynamics of lifelong foreign language learning (FLL) individuals. We recorded the retrospective stories of 3 exceptionally motivated French senior learners of English, aged 65 to 80, from childhood to their current learning experience. Our triangulated and multimodal approach elicited written, oral and visual data. An inductive thematic analysis first highlighted the emergence of motivational peaks, subsequently followed by the examination of clusters of self-constructs within participants' individual time frames in light of the L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS) framework. Results showed that upon retirement all three learners integrated language learning into their daily routine, incorporating it as an integral part of their identity and broader sense of self outside L2 domain-specific motivational constructs. A particularly unyielding hybrid L2 self emerged in later years, drawing from the combination of ought-to, ideal and anti-ought-to selves that prevailed with different degrees of intensity and interaction according to life periods.
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The present study investigated global behavioral adaptation effects to conflict arising from different distractor modalities. Three experiments were conducted using an Eriksen flanker paradigm with constant visual targets, but randomly varying auditory or visual distractors. In Experiment 1, the proportion of congruent to incongruent trials was varied for both distractor modalities, whereas in Experiments 2A and 2B, this proportion congruency (PC) manipulation was applied to trials with one distractor modality (inducer) to test potential behavioral transfer effects to trials with the other distractor modality (diagnostic). In all experiments, mean proportion congruency effects (PCEs) were present in trials with a PC manipulation, but there was no evidence of transfer to diagnostic trials in Experiments 2A and 2B. Distributional analyses (delta plots) provided further evidence for distractor modality-specific global behavioral adaptations by showing differences in the slope of delta plots with visual but not auditory distractors when increasing the ratio of congruent trials. Thus, it is suggested that distractor modalities constrain global behavioral adaptation effects due to the learning of modality-specific memory traces (e.g., distractor-target associations) and/or the modality-specific cognitive control processes (e.g., suppression of modality-specific distractor-based activation). Moreover, additional analyses revealed partial transfer of the congruency sequence effect across trials with different distractor modalities suggesting that distractor modality may differentially affect local and global behavioral adaptations.
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Attentional lapses have been found to impair everything from basic perception to learning and memory. Yet, despite the well documented costs of lapses on cognition, recent work suggests that lapses might unexpectedly confer some benefits. One potential benefit is that lapses broaden our learning to integrate seemingly irrelevant content that could later prove useful–a benefit that prior research focusing only on goal relevant memory would miss. Here, we measure how fluctuations in sustained attention influence the learning of seemingly goal-irrelevant content that competes for attention with target content. Participants completed a correlated flanker task in which they categorized central targets (letters or numbers) while ignoring peripheral flanking symbols that shared hidden probabilistic relationships with the targets. We found that across participants, higher rates of attentional lapses correlated with greater learning of the target-flanker relationships. Moreover, within participants, learning was more evident during attentional lapses. These findings address long-standing theoretical debates and reveal a benefit of attentional lapses: they expand the scope of learning and decisions beyond the strictly relevant.
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As a high-order cognitive ability, creativity is viewed as the result of complex interplay between a set of mental processes. However, previous studies have mainly tested one-to-one mutual relations between creativity and other cognitive abilities. It lacks studies to examine whether creativity is related to the interaction between cognitive systems. The current study aimed to fill this gap by testing the relations of creativity to the interactions between cognitive control and episodic memory systems using both behavioral and neuroimaging methods. The Alternative Uses Task was used to measure the divergent component of creativity. A computer-based behavioral task was used to measure cognitive control, episodic memory, and their interactions. Additionally, the interactions between cognitive systems were characterized by computing the resting-state functional connectivity between hippocampus and prefrontal regions, which are the neural substrates for episodic memory and cognitive control, respectively. By analyzing these behavioral and neuroimaging data, the behavioral results indicated that creativity was significantly related to the effect of cognitive control induced by switching tasks or proactive cues on subsequent memories of items or sources. Additionally, neuroimaging results showed that creativity was significantly related to the connectivity from hippocampus to both left superior frontal gyrus and middle frontal gyrus; such relations were also differentiated between anterior and posterior hippocampus. Altogether, these findings suggest that creativity is related to interactions between cognitive control and episodic memory, supporting the claim that creativity is the result of complex interplay between high-order cognitive functions.
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The authors investigated the possibility that working memory span tasks are influenced by interference and that interference contributes to the correlation between span and other measures. Younger and older adults received the span task either in the standard format or one designed to reduce the impact of interference with no impact on capacity demands. Participants then read and recalled a short prose passage. Reducing the amount of interference in the span task raised span scores, replicating previous results (C. P. May, L. Hasher, & M. J. Kane, 1999). The same interference-reducing manipulations that raised span substantially altered the relation between span and prose recall. These results suggest that span is influenced by interference, that age differences in span may be due to differences in the ability to overcome interference rather than to differences in capacity, and that interference plays an important role in the relation between span and other tasks.
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Language learners must place unfamiliar words into categories, often with few explicit indicators about when and how that word can be used grammatically. Reeder, Newport, and Aslin (2013) showed that college students can learn grammatical form classes from an artificial language by relying solely on distributional information (i.e., contextual cues in the input). Here, 2 experiments revealed that healthy older adults also show such statistical learning, though they are poorer than young at distinguishing grammatical from ungrammatical strings. This finding expands knowledge of which aspects of learning vary with aging, with potential implications for second language learning in late adulthood.
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Previous event-related potential (ERP) and neuroimaging evidence suggests that directing attention toward single item-context associations compared to intra-item features at encoding improves context memory performance and reduces demands on strategic retrieval operations in young and older adults. In everyday situations, however, there are multiple event features competing for our attention. It is not currently known how selectively attending to one contextual feature while attempting to ignore another influences context memory performance and the processes that support successful retrieval in the young and old. We investigated this issue in the current ERP study. Young and older participants studied pictures of objects in the presence of two contextual features: a color and a scene, and their attention was directed to the object's relationship with one of those contexts. Participants made context memory decisions for both attended and unattended contexts and rated their confidence in those decisions. Behavioral results showed that while both groups were generally successful in applying selective attention during context encoding, older adults were less confident in their context memory decisions for attended features and showed greater dependence in context memory accuracy for attended and unattended contextual features (i.e., hyper-binding). ERP results were largely consistent between age groups but older adults showed a more pronounced late posterior negativity (LPN) implicated in episodic reconstruction processes. We conclude that age-related suppression deficits during encoding result in reduced selectivity in context memory, thereby increasing subsequent demands on episodic reconstruction processes when sought after details are not readily retrieved.
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Recent research has suggested that an episodic specificity induction-brief training in recollecting the details of a past experience-enhances divergent creative thinking on the alternate uses task (AUT) in young adults, without affecting performance on tasks thought to involve little divergent thinking; however, the generalizability of these results to other populations and tasks is unknown. In the present experiments, we examined whether the effects of an episodic specificity induction would extend to older adults and a different index of divergent thinking, the consequences task. In Experiment 1, the specificity induction significantly enhanced divergent thinking on the AUT in both young and older adults, as compared with a control induction not requiring specific episodic retrieval; performance on a task involving little divergent thinking (generating associates for common objects) did not vary as a function of induction. No overall age-related differences were observed on either task. In Experiment 2, the specificity induction significantly enhanced divergent thinking (in terms of generating consequences of novel scenarios) in young adults, relative to another control induction not requiring episodic retrieval. To examine the types of creative ideas affected by the induction, the participants in both experiments also labeled each of their divergent-thinking responses as an "old idea" from memory or a "new idea" from imagination. New, and to some extent old, ideas were significantly boosted following the specificity induction relative to the control. These experiments provide novel evidence that an episodic specificity induction can boost divergent thinking in young and older adults, and indicate that episodic memory is involved in multiple divergent-thinking tasks.
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Audiovisual (AV) speech perception is the process by which auditory and visual sensory signals are integrated and used to understand what a talker is saying during face-to-face communication. This form of communication is markedly superior to speech perception in either sensory modality alone. However, there are additional lexical factors that are affected by age-related cognitive changes that may contribute to differences in AV perception. In the current study, we extended an existing model of spoken word identification to the AV domain, and examined the cognitive factors that contribute to age-related and individual differences in AV perception of words varying in lexical difficulty (i.e., on the basis of competing items). Young (n = 49) and older adults (n = 50) completed a series of cognitive inhibition tasks and a spoken word identification task. The words were presented in auditory-only, visual-only, and AV conditions, and were equally divided into lexically hard (words with many competitors) and lexically easy (words with few competitors). Overall, young adults demonstrated better inhibitory abilities and higher identification performance than older adults. However, whereas no relationship was observed between inhibitory abilities and AV word identification performance in young adults, there was a significant relationship between Stroop interference and AV identification of lexically hard words in older adults. These results are interpreted within the framework of existing models of spoken-word recognition with implications for how cognitive deficits in older adults contribute to speech perception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).
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Divergent thinking is a process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions or responses, and is a critical element of creativity. Lesion and imaging studies have shown that the frontal lobes are important in mediating divergent thinking, and frontal lobe function is highly dependent on white matter connections with subcortical and cortical networks. Normal aging often results in deficits in functions controlled by the frontal lobes, as well as decrements in white-matter connectivity. Objectives of this study included comparing non-time-constrained tasks of verbal divergent processing in young adults (YAs) and older adults (OAs) and correlating performance with tasks of working memory, language ability, and disengagement/inhibition. Participants were 30 YAs and 30 OAs. Contrary to the a priori hypothesis, OAs produced significantly more unique responses than YAs, although total fluency was not significantly different. Correlational analyses examining the groups together and separately revealed a number of differences suggesting that the groups were utilizing different underlying cognitive abilities to complete these tasks. Future studies are needed to test the hypothesis that the primary factor resulting in higher uniqueness scores for the OAs was a greater wealth of experiences, including in the use of language.
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As the global population ages, older decision makers will be required to take greater responsibility for their own physical, psychological and financial well-being. With this in mind, researchers have begun to examine the effects of ageing on decision making and associated neural circuits. A new 'affect-integration-motivation' (AIM) framework may help to clarify how affective and motivational circuits support decision making. Recent research has shed light on whether and how ageing influences these circuits, providing an interdisciplinary account of how ageing can alter decision making.
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This randomized controlled study (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02007616) investigated the maintenance of training effects of 20 1-hr non-action video game training sessions with selected games from a commercial package on several age-declining cognitive functions and subjective wellbeing after a 3-month no-contact period. Two groups of cognitively normal older adults participated in both the post-training (posttest) and the present follow-up study, the experimental group who received training and the control group who attended several meetings with the research team during the study but did not receive training. Groups were similar at baseline on demographics, vocabulary, global cognition, and depression status. Significant improvements in the trained group, and no variation in the control group had been previously found at posttest, in processing speed, attention and visual recognition memory, as well as in two dimensions of subjective wellbeing. In the current study, improvement from baseline to 3 months follow-up was found only in wellbeing (Affection and Assertivity dimensions) in the trained group whereas there was no change in the control group. Previous significant improvements in processing speed, attention and spatial memory become non-significant after the 3-month interval. Training older adults with non-action video games enhanced aspects of cognition just after training but this effect disappeared after a 3-month no-contact follow-up period. Cognitive plasticity can be induced in older adults by training, but to maintain the benefits periodic boosting sessions would be necessary.
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This study tested the common assumption that, to be most effective, working memory (WM) training should be adaptive (i.e., task difficulty is adjusted to individual performance). Indirect evidence for this assumption stems from studies comparing adaptive training to a condition in which tasks are practiced on the easiest level of difficulty only [cf. Klingberg (Trends Cogn Sci 14:317–324, 2010)], thereby, however, confounding adaptivity and exposure to varying task difficulty. For a more direct test of this hypothesis, we randomly assigned 130 young adults to one of the three WM training procedures (adaptive, randomized, or self-selected change in training task difficulty) or to an active control group. Despite large performance increases in the trained WM tasks, we observed neither transfer to untrained structurally dissimilar WM tasks nor far transfer to reasoning. Surprisingly, neither training nor transfer effects were modulated by training procedure, indicating that exposure to varying levels of task difficulty is sufficient for inducing training gains.
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Significance At a time when the world’s 65-and-older population will double by 2035, policy changes have transferred many complex financial and healthcare decisions to individuals. Age-related declines in cognitive ability raise the specter that older adults facing major financial decisions may find them increasingly challenging. We explore whether knowledge and expertise accumulated from past decisions can offset age-related cognitive declines. Using a unique dataset that combines measures of cognitive ability, knowledge, and credit scores—a measure of creditworthiness that reflects sustained ability for sound financial decision-making—we find that cognitive decline does not spell doom. Instead, domain-specific knowledge and expertise provide an alternative route to sound financial decisions. These results suggest guidelines for designing effective interventions and decision aids across the life span.
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Background: New effective interventions to attenuate age-related cognitive decline are a global priority. Computerized cognitive training (CCT) is believed to be safe and can be inexpensive, but neither its efficacy in enhancing cognitive performance in healthy older adults nor the impact of design factors on such efficacy has been systematically analyzed. Our aim therefore was to quantitatively assess whether CCT programs can enhance cognition in healthy older adults, discriminate responsive from nonresponsive cognitive domains, and identify the most salient design factors. Methods and findings: We systematically searched Medline, Embase, and PsycINFO for relevant studies from the databases' inception to 9 July 2014. Eligible studies were randomized controlled trials investigating the effects of ≥ 4 h of CCT on performance in neuropsychological tests in older adults without dementia or other cognitive impairment. Fifty-two studies encompassing 4,885 participants were eligible. Intervention designs varied considerably, but after removal of one outlier, heterogeneity across studies was small (I(2) = 29.92%). There was no systematic evidence of publication bias. The overall effect size (Hedges' g, random effects model) for CCT versus control was small and statistically significant, g = 0.22 (95% CI 0.15 to 0.29). Small to moderate effect sizes were found for nonverbal memory, g = 0.24 (95% CI 0.09 to 0.38); verbal memory, g = 0.08 (95% CI 0.01 to 0.15); working memory (WM), g = 0.22 (95% CI 0.09 to 0.35); processing speed, g = 0.31 (95% CI 0.11 to 0.50); and visuospatial skills, g = 0.30 (95% CI 0.07 to 0.54). No significant effects were found for executive functions and attention. Moderator analyses revealed that home-based administration was ineffective compared to group-based training, and that more than three training sessions per week was ineffective versus three or fewer. There was no evidence for the effectiveness of WM training, and only weak evidence for sessions less than 30 min. These results are limited to healthy older adults, and do not address the durability of training effects. Conclusions: CCT is modestly effective at improving cognitive performance in healthy older adults, but efficacy varies across cognitive domains and is largely determined by design choices. Unsupervised at-home training and training more than three times per week are specifically ineffective. Further research is required to enhance efficacy of the intervention. Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary.
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Evidence from perceptually based implicit memory tasks demonstrates greater priming from distracting information among older compared with younger adults. We examined whether older adults also show greater conceptually based implicit priming from distracting information. We measured priming using a general-knowledge test that was preceded by an incidental-encoding task (a color-naming Stroop task in one experiment and a 1-back task involving pictures with irrelevant words superimposed in a second experiment). Younger adults showed no priming from the distracting information in either experiment, whereas older adults showed reliable priming in both experiments. Thus, unlike young adults, older adults process irrelevant information conceptually and then can use that information to boost their performance on a subsequent task.
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Retrieving a subset of items can cause the forgetting of other items, a phenomenon referred to as retrieval-induced forgetting. According to some theorists, retrieval-induced forgetting is the consequence of an inhibitory mechanism that acts to reduce the accessibility of nontarget items that interfere with the retrieval of target items. Other theorists argue that inhibition is unnecessary to account for retrieval-induced forgetting, contending instead that the phenomenon can be best explained by noninhibitory mechanisms, such as strength-based competition or blocking. The current article provides the first major meta-analysis of retrieval-induced forgetting, conducted with the primary purpose of quantitatively evaluating the multitude of findings that have been used to contrast these 2 theoretical viewpoints. The results largely supported inhibition accounts but also provided some challenging evidence, with the nature of the results often varying as a function of how retrieval-induced forgetting was assessed. Implications for further research and theory development are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).
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When reminded of unwanted memories, people often attempt to suppress these experiences from awareness. Prior work indicates that control processes mediated by the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) modulate hippocampal activity during such retrieval suppression. It remains unknown whether this modulation plays a role in purging an intrusive memory from consciousness. Here, we combined fMRI and effective connectivity analyses with phenomenological reports to scrutinize a role for adaptive top-down suppression of hippocampal retrieval processes in terminating mnemonic awareness of intrusive memories. Participants either suppressed or recalled memories of pictures depicting faces or places. After each trial, they reported their success at regulating awareness of the memory. DLPFC activation was greatest when unwanted memories intruded into consciousness and needed to be purged, and this increased engagement predicted superior control of intrusive memories over time. However, hippocampal activity was decreased during the suppression of place memories only. Importantly, the inhibitory influence of the DLPFC on the hippocampus was linked to the ensuing reduction in intrusions of the suppressed memories. Individuals who exhibited negative top-down coupling during early suppression attempts experienced fewer involuntary memory intrusions later on. Over repeated suppressions, the DLPFC-hippocampus connectivity grew less negative with the degree that they no longer had to purge unwanted memories from awareness. These findings support a role of DLPFC in countermanding the unfolding recollection of an unwanted memory via the suppression of hippocampal processing, a mechanism that may contribute to adaptation in the aftermath of traumatic experiences.
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Compared to children, adults are bad at learning language. This is counterintuitive; adults outperform children on most measures of cognition, especially those that involve effort (which continue to mature into early adulthood). The present study asks whether these mature effortful abilities interfere with language learning in adults and further, whether interference occurs equally for aspects of language that adults are good (word-segmentation) versus bad (grammar) at learning. Learners were exposed to an artificial language comprised of statistically defined words that belong to phonologically defined categories (grammar). Exposure occurred under passive or effortful conditions. Passive learners were told to listen while effortful learners were instructed to try to 1) learn the words, 2) learn the categories, or 3) learn the category-order. Effortful learners showed an advantage for learning words while passive learners showed an advantage for learning the categories. Effort can therefore hurt the learning of categories.
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It has been suggested that video game training enhances cognitive functions in young and older adults. However, effects across studies are mixed. We conducted a meta-analysis to examine the hypothesis that training healthy older adults with video games enhances their cognitive functioning. The studies included in the meta-analysis were video game training interventions with pre- and posttraining measures. Twenty experimental studies published between 1986 and 2013, involving 474 trained and 439 healthy older controls, met the inclusion criteria. The results indicate that video game training produces positive effects on several cognitive functions, including reaction time (RT), attention, memory, and global cognition. The heterogeneity test did not show a significant heterogeneity (I2 � 20.69%) but this did not preclude a further examination of moderator variables. The magnitude of this effect was moderated by methodological and personal factors, including the age of the trainees and the duration of the intervention. The findings suggest that cognitive and neural plasticity is maintained to a certain extent in old age. Training older adults with video games enhances several aspects of cognition and might be a valuable intervention for cognitive enhancement.
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Behavioral evidence suggests that the attention-based ability to regulate distraction varies across the day in synchrony with a circadian arousal rhythm that changes across the life span. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we assessed whether neural activity in an attention control network also varies across the day and with behavioral markers. We tested older adults in the morning or afternoon and younger adults tested in the afternoon using a 1-back task with superimposed distractors, followed by an implicit test for the distractors. Behavioral results replicated earlier findings with older adults tested in the morning better able to ignore distraction than those tested in the afternoon. Imaging results showed that time of testing modulates task-related fMRI signals in older adults and that age differences were reduced when older adults are tested at peak times of day. In particular, older adults tested in the morning activated similar cognitive control regions to those activated by young adults (rostral prefrontal and superior parietal cortex), whereas older adults tested in the afternoon were reliably different; furthermore, the degree to which participants were able to activate the control regions listed above correlated with the ability to suppress distracting information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).
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Older adults experience deficits in working memory (WM) that are acutely exacerbated by the presence of distracting information. Human neurophysiological studies have revealed that these changes are accompanied by a diminished ability to suppress visual cortical activity associated with task-irrelevant information. Although this is often attributed to deficits in top-down control from a prefrontal cortical source, this has not yet been directly demonstrated. Here we evaluate the neural basis of distraction's negative impact on WM and the impairment in neural suppression in older adults by performing structural and functional MRIs while older participants engage in tasks that require remembering relevant visual stimuli in the context of overlapping irrelevant stimuli. Analysis supports both an age-related distraction effect and neural suppression deficit, and extends our understanding by revealing an alteration in functional connectivity between visual cortices and a region in the default network, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Moreover, within the older population, the magnitude of WM distractibility and neural suppression are both associated with individual differences in cortical volume and activity of the mPFC, as well as its associated white-matter tracts.
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A large body of evidence supports the importance of focused attention for encoding and task performance. Yet young children with immature regulation of focused attention are often placed in elementary-school classrooms containing many displays that are not relevant to ongoing instruction. We investigated whether such displays can affect children's ability to maintain focused attention during instruction and to learn the lesson content. We placed kindergarten children in a laboratory classroom for six introductory science lessons, and we experimentally manipulated the visual environment in the classroom. Children were more distracted by the visual environment, spent more time off task, and demonstrated smaller learning gains when the walls were highly decorated than when the decorations were removed.
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Retrieving information from long-term memory can result in the episodic forgetting of related material. One influential account states that this retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) phenomenon reflects inhibitory mechanisms called into play to decrease retrieval competition. Recent neuroimaging studies suggested that the prefrontal cortex, which is critically engaged in inhibitory processing, is also involved in retrieval competition situations. Here, we used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to address whether inhibitory processes could be causally linked to RIF. tDCS was administered over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during the retrieval-practice phase in a standard retrieval-practice paradigm. Sixty human participants were randomly assigned to anodal, cathodal, or sham-control groups. The groups showed comparable benefits for practiced items. In contrast, unlike both the sham and anodal groups, the cathodal group exhibited no RIF. This pattern is interpreted as evidence for a causal role of inhibitory mechanisms in episodic retrieval and forgetting.
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Not all memories are equally welcome in awareness. People limit the time they spend thinking about unpleasant experiences, a process that begins during encoding, but that continues when cues later remind someone of the memory. Here, we review the emerging behavioural and neuroimaging evidence that suppressing awareness of an unwelcome memory, at encoding or retrieval, is achieved by inhibitory control processes mediated by the lateral prefrontal cortex. These mechanisms interact with neural structures that represent experiences in memory, disrupting traces that support retention. Thus, mechanisms engaged to regulate momentary awareness introduce lasting biases in which experiences remain accessible. We argue that theories of forgetting that neglect the motivated control of awareness omit a powerful force shaping the retention of our past.
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Divergent thinking is a process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions or responses, and is a critical element of creativity. Lesion and imaging studies have shown that the frontal lobes are important in mediating divergent thinking, and frontal lobe function is highly dependent on white matter connections with subcortical and cortical networks. Normal aging often results in deficits in functions controlled by the frontal lobes, as well as decrements in white-matter connectivity. Objectives of this study included comparing non-time-constrained tasks of verbal divergent processing in young adults (YAs) and older adults (OAs) and correlating performance with tasks of working memory, language ability, and disengagement/inhibition. Participants were 30 YAs and 30 OAs. Contrary to the a priori hypothesis, OAs produced significantly more unique responses than YAs, although total fluency was not significantly different. Correlational analyses examining the groups together and separately revealed a number of differences suggesting that the groups were utilizing different underlying cognitive abilities to complete these tasks. Future studies are needed to test the hypothesis that the primary factor resulting in higher uniqueness scores for the OAs was a greater wealth of experiences, including in the use of language.
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