EEG correlates of visual short-term memory in older age vary with adult lifespan cognitive development

Age Differences in Hemispheric Lateralization in Spatial and Verbal Visual Working Memory

“…However, the CDA has also been observed in response to letters presented as memoranda in change-detection (Raisic, Burton, & Woodman, 2019) and verbal recall VWM tasks (Wiegand, Töllner, Habekost, et al, 2014). In line with a decline of VWM performance in older adults, CDA amplitudes have been shown to be reduced or less modulated by load in older compared to younger adults in both paradigms (Jost et al, 2011;Sander, Werkle-Bergner, & Lindenberger, 2011;Wiegand et al, 2018). 6 The reader should note that in these paradigms, VWM performance and the CDA were typically calculated based on averaging across left and right hemifield conditions, thus disregarding any differences in hemispheric processing.…”

“…Participants of the first sample performed a verbal VWM task (see also Wiegand et al, 2018), based on Bundesen's (1990) computational Theory of Visual Attention (TVA). More specifically, they were asked to encode and retain (for later report) as many briefly presented arrays of letters while their electrophysiological and behavioral responses were recorded.…”

“…The experiment further contained 180 trials with individually adapted, shorter exposure durations. These trials were important for the TVAbased estimation of the attentional (performance) parameters, which was based on all 400 trials (Bundesen, 1990;Dyrholm et al, 2011;Kyllingsbaek, 2006; see also Napiórkowski et al, 2019, andWiegand et al, 2018, for details of the EEG design in this task). Trial types were presented randomly intermixed.…”

“…In line with previous research (e.g., Luria, 2016), this was the electrode PO7/8. 15 As presentation times of memory arrays differed between tasks, and as previous studies point to possible differences between the spatial and verbal tasks in the timing of the maximal CDA amplitudes (Sander et al, 2011;Wiegand et al, , 2018, we tested each sample point within a broader time window of 300 ms to 800 ms for a reliable difference between ipsi-and contralateral activity (collapsed across hemispheres and age groups, but separately for each task), using a correction procedure for multiple comparisons based on false discovery rates (Benjamini-Yekutieli procedure, as implemented in FieldTrip). This procedure yielded significant differences between the ipsi-and contralateral activity between 320 ms and 660 ms for the verbal VWM task and between 410 ms and 750 ms for the spatial VWM task.…”

“…To our knowledge, no study has investigated hemispheric differences in the CDA in a VWM task that uses verbal stimuli, as yet. However, behaviorally (measured in terms of the capacity parameter K; e.g., Bundesen, 1990), a right-hemifield advantage was reported in both younger (Kraft et al, 2015) and older adults (Wiegand et al, 2018), and this lateralization was shown to be increased by right frontal and parietal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in older adults (Brosnan et al, 2017).…”