Individual differences in decoding skill, print exposure, and cortical structure in young adults

Johns, Clinton L.; Jahn, Andrew; Jones, Hannah; Kush, Dave; Molfese, Peter J.; Dyke, Julie A. Van; Magnuson, James S.; Tabor, Whitney; Mencl, W. Einar; Shankweiler, Donald; Braze, David

doi:10.31234/osf.io/f7tpn

Cited by 1 publication

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“…In fact, print exposure represents the accumulated reading experience a person has acquired throughout his/her lifetime, a dimension that is directly linked to our prior knowledge, and therefore, to our crystalized intelligence (Horn & Cattell, 1966). Recent neuroscientific evidence has shown that print exposure is correlated with grey matter cortical thickness in the left inferior frontal gyrus and the left fusiform gyrus, suggesting reading experience might be connected to maturational brain processes that are related to skill consolidation (Goldman & Manis, 2013; Johns et al, 2018). In addition, print exposure has been associated with many verbal abilities such as vocabulary size, syntactic and phonological processing, verbal fluency, and other higher-level text comprehension processes (e.g., Acheson, Wells & MacDonald, 2008), usually related to crystalised rather than fluid intelligence (Cattell, 1971; Stamenković & Holyoak, 2018).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preserved executive control in ageing: The role of literacy experience

Pérez

Fotiadou

Tsimpli

2022

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Healthy ageing is commonly accompanied by cognitive decline affecting several domains such as executive control, whereas certain verbal skills remain relatively preserved. Interestingly, recent scientific research has shown that some intellectual activities may be linked to beneficial effects, delaying or even alleviating cognitive decline in the elderly. Thirty young (age: M = 23) and thirty old (age: M = 66) adults were assessed in executive control (switching) and literacy experience (print exposure). First, we tried to confirm whether healthy ageing was generally associated with deficits in switching by looking at mixing cost effects, to then investigate if individual differences in print exposure explained variation in that age-related mixing costs. Both accuracy and reaction times mixing cost indexes demonstrated larger cost in old (but not in young) adults when switching from local to global information. More importantly, this cost effect disappeared in old adults with higher print exposure (reaction times). Our findings suggest literacy experience accumulated across the life-span may act as a cognitive reserve proxy to prevent executive control decline.

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