Cognition in Healthy Aging

Abstract

The study of cognitive change across a life span, both in pathological and healthy samples, has been heavily influenced by developments in cognitive psychology as a theoretical paradigm, neuropsychology and other bio-medical fields; this alongside the increase in new longitudinal and cohort designs, complemented in the last decades by the evaluation of experimental interventions. Here, a review of aging databases was conducted, looking for the most relevant studies carried out on cognitive functioning in healthy older adults. The aim was to review not only longitudinal, cross-sectional or cohort studies, but also by intervention program evaluations. The most important studies, searching for long-term patterns of stability and change of cognitive measures across a life span and in old age, have shown a great range of inter-individual variability in cognitive functioning changes attributed to age. Furthermore, intellectual functioning in healthy individuals seems to decline rather late in life, if ever, as shown in longitudinal studies where age-related decline of cognitive functioning occurs later in life than indicated by cross-sectional studies. The longitudinal evidence and experimental trials have shown the benefits of aerobic physical exercise and an intellectually engaged lifestyle, suggesting that bio-psycho-socioenvironmental factors concurrently with age predict or determine both positive or negative change or stability in cognition in later life.

Usage-Based Individual Differences in the Probabilistic Processing of Multi-Word Sequences

“…Age has widely been assumed to have a modulatory effect on predictive processing; however, the direction of this effect is still under debate (Gordon et al, 2016;Dave et al, 2018;Payne and Silcox, 2019). On the one hand, older adults generally have greater crystallized intelligence (i.e., knowledge accumulated throughout the lifespan), which is comprised of non-linguistic world knowledge, vocabulary (Brysbaert et al, 2016;Sánchez-Izquierdo and Fernández-Ballesteros, 2021), schematic or generalized representations of common occurrences (Ghosh and Gilboa, 2014), and more entrenched distributional knowledge (such as which units of language typically cooccur in language use) (Ramscar et al, 2014;Whitford and Titone, 2019). It has been hypothesized that older adults may rely on their superior crystallized knowledge to engage more readily in linguistic prediction, possibly as a strategy to compensate for perceptual (auditory, visual) decline or for age-related slowing (for review, see Gordon et al, 2016;Payne and Silcox, 2019).…”

Differences in the post-stroke innate immune response between young and old

“…Stressful experiences and other environmental factors cumulatively promote epigenetic changes and somatic mutations that can accelerate the biological age [ 10 ]. Accordingly, the rate of functional decline is highly variable between individuals [ 11 ], and it is more related to the biological age rather than the chronological age. By similarity, the biological age rather than the chronological age is determinant in the worsening effect of age on stroke outcome [ 12 ].…”

Analysis of Scientometric Indicators in Publications Associated with Healthy Aging in the World, Period 2011–2020

“…There are certain factors such as lifestyle that favor the appearance of age-related and health-related matters and that decrease life expectancy in the general population [ 11 , 12 ]. Aging is an accelerated phenomenon throughout the world; in 2004, there were almost 500 million people over 65 years of age, and it is expected that this number will increase to 2 billion people by 2050, which will have critical implications for planning and health provision in many countries [ 13 ].…”