Systemic racism can have broad impacts on health in ethnoracial minorities. One way is by suppressing socioeconomic status (SES) levels through barriers to achieve higher income, wealth, and educational attainment. Additionally, the weathering hypothesis proposes that the various stressful adversities faced by ethnoracial minorities lead to greater wear and tear on the body, known as allostatic load. In the present study, we extend these ideas to cognitive health in a tri-ethnic sample of young adults—when cognition and brain health is arguably at their peak. Specifically, we tested competing mediation models that might shed light on how two key factors caused by systemic racism—SES and perceived stress—intersect to explain ethnoracial disparities in cognition. We found evidence for partial mediation via a pathway from SES to stress on episodic memory, working memory capacity, and executive function in Black Americans relative to non-Hispanic White Americans. Additionally, we found that stress partially mediated the ethnoracial disparities in working memory updating for lower SES Black and Hispanic Americans relative to non-Hispanic White Americans, showing that higher SES can sometimes reduce the negative effects stress has on these disparities in some cognitive domains. Overall, these findings suggest that multiple pathways exist in which lower SES creates a stressful environment to impact ethnoracial disparities cognition. These pathways differ depending on the specific ethnoracial category and cognitive domain. The present results may offer insight into strategies to help mitigate the late-life risk for neurocognitive disorders in ethnoracial minorities.

Longitudinal research suggests that genetic, lifestyle, and environmental factors enhance one's risk for developing Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD). However, it is not known how an accumulation of such factors impact brain functioning. One barrier to this research is that increased risk for ADRD affects the cerebrovascular system and, therefore, alters the link between neural activity and the fMRI BOLD signal. To better interpret fMRI findings, several steps were taken to adjust fMRI activity thereby reducing such cerebrovascular effects. We hypothesized that as the number of ADRD risk factors increase, brain regions within the medial temporal lobes and the default mode network would exhibit altered brain activity during an episodic memory retrieval task. Middle-aged and older adults (aged 50-74) free of dementia were recruited with varying levels of risk and underwent a neuropsychological battery and fMRI. In the memory task, participants viewed a pair of pictures. In an alternative-forced-choice test, participants viewed a picture cue and had to determine which of four pictures was paired with the cue. Increased dementia risk was positively associated with brain activity in regions of interest within the default mode network, the hippocampus, and the entorhinal cortex during memory retrieval. Whole-brain analyses revealed additional positive associations in prefrontal and occipito-temporal cortices. Risk factors most contributing to these elevated levels of brain activity included hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and cholesterol. We also ruled out confounds due to in-scanner performance and premorbid ability. Cumulative risk might represent early signs of burnout in brain regions underlying episodic memory.

Memory consolidation is well known to occur during sleep, but might start immediately after encoding new information while awake. While consolidation processes are important across the lifespan, they may be even more important to maintain memory functioning in old age. We tested whether a novel measure of information processing known as network complexity might be sensitive to post-encoding consolidation mechanisms in a sample of young, middle-aged, and older adults. Network complexity was calculated by assessing the irregularity of brain signals within a network over time using multiscale entropy. To capture post-encoding mechanisms, network complexity was estimated using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during rest before and after encoding of picture pairs, and subtracted between the two rest periods. Participants received a five-alternative-choice memory test to assess associative memory performance. Results indicated that aging was associated with an increase in network complexity from pre- to post-encoding in the default mode network (DMN). Increases in network complexity in the DMN also were associated with better subsequent memory across all age groups. These findings suggest that network complexity is sensitive to post-encoding consolidation mechanisms that enhance memory performance. These post-encoding mechanisms may represent a pathway to support memory performance in the face of overall memory declines.

Having a parent with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related dementias confers a risk for developing these types of neurocognitive disorders in old age, but the mechanisms underlying this risk are understudied. Although the hippocampus is often one of the earliest brain regions to undergo change in the AD process, we do not know how early in the lifespan such changes might occur or whether they differ early in the lifespan as a function of family history of AD. Using a rare sample, young adults with a parent with late-onset dementia, we investigated whether brain abnormalities could already be detected compared with a matched sample. Moreover, we employed simple yet novel techniques to characterize resting brain activity (mean and standard deviation) and brain volume in the hippocampus. Young adults with a parent with dementia showed greater resting mean activity and smaller volumes in the left hippocampus compared to young adults without a parent with dementia. Having a parent with AD or a related dementia was associated with early aberrations in brain function and structure. This early hippocampal dysfunction may be due to aberrant neural firing, which may increase the risk for a diagnosis of dementia in old age.

This integrated mixed methods analysis examined outcomes for students enrolled in an experiential course (BATL), a didactic psychology of aging course, and introductory psychology courses. Students in the experiential course showed increased empathy, F(2, 345) = 29.058, p = .000 (M = 47.52, SD = .75), improved attitudes towards persons with dementia (PWDs), F(2,355) = 8.98, p < .0001 (M = 14.25, SD = .36), and greater increased interest in working with older adults, F(2,361) = 30.228, p=.000 compared to the other courses. A qualitative phase II follow-up explanations model (Creswell et. al., 2003) of participants’ journals using a hermeneutic coding process was employed to explore underlying mechanisms for such changes. These identified underlying mechanisms have significant implications for increasing interest and ability among students to work effectively with older adults with and without cognitive impairment. Further, this information yields insights for addressing workforce shortages in geriatric care.