Aging inevitably gives rise to many late-life challenges and transitions that impose threats for one’s physical and mental health, which can greatly impact our well-being and quality of life. Hence, the key to successful aging may not be the absence of these challenges and transitions, but the ability to demonstrate resilience to them. We recently started a large-scale study (N > 10.000) among older adults (55 years or older) in the Netherlands, with the aim to understand resilience as an emergent property that arises through the interplay between various (risk and protective) factors from different domains. Participants are asked to complete online questionnaires and tests that cover a multitude of relevant factors from multiple domains (e.g., physical, psychological, cognitive, social, environmental). Relationships between those factors will be analysed through network analysis, in which conditional dependencies between factors are depicted in a network of nodes. In this way, critical resilience (protective) and risk factors can be identified. This study offers a unique possibility to obtain insights into the factors that characterize and contribute to resilience in old age and thereby assist in generating hypotheses for follow up work. The contribution of this study in the growing field of resilience research, as well as the limitations, are discussed accordingly.
Creativity is considered to be the driving force behind innovation and progress, yet the neural signature of creative thought remains elusive. Recently, creative thinking has been associated with dynamics between large-scale intrinsic neural networks. In the current study, we investigated whether fluctuations of activity in the control network is linked to creative thinking. We designed a 'caption this' task in which participants had to provide an original and apt caption to accompany a presented picture while EEG signals were recorded. To assess changing levels of cognitive control we made use of the strong relationship between mid frontal oscillatory activity in the theta range (4-7 HZ) and topdown control. This experimental set-up allowed us to assess the relationship between trial-by-trial changes in neural measures of top-down control and fluctuations in creativity. Results demonstrate that specifically when attention needs to be internally oriented lower levels of top-down control resulted in higher levels of creativity. In addition, increased creativity related to enhanced long-range functional connectivity between occipital and mid frontal cortex when the presented picture was no longer visible. Together, our findings demonstrate that creativity benefits from lower levels of top-down control and enhanced processing of internal information.
Performance monitoring is a key cognitive function, allowing to detect mistakes and adapt future behaviour. Post-decisional neural signals have been identified that are sensitive to decision accuracy, decision confidence and subsequent adaptation. Here, we review recent work that supports an understanding of late error/confidence signals in terms of the computational process of post-decisional evidence accumulation. We argue that the error positivity, a positive-going centro-parietal potential measured through scalp electrophysiology, reflects the post-decisional evidence accumulation process itself, which follows a boundary crossing event corresponding to initial decision commitment. This proposal provides a powerful explanation for both the morphological characteristics of the signal and its relation to various expressions of performance monitoring. Moreover, it suggests that the error positivity –a signal with thus far unique properties in cognitive neuroscience – can be leveraged to furnish key new insights into the inputs to, adaptation, and sequelae of the post-decisional accumulation process.
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