Normal aging increases discriminal dispersion in visuospatial short-term memory.

Noack, Hannes; Lövdén, Martin; Lindenberger, Ulman

doi:10.1037/a0027251

Cited by 28 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 87 publications

(193 reference statements)

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“…Only a handful of objects can be simultaneously attended to or held in VSTM, and this capacity limit declines with normal ageing [50]. Moreover, VSTM capacity is predictive of domain-general cognitive abilities e.g., [51].…”

Section: Research Method: Materials and Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) study protocol: a cross-sectional, lifespan, multidisciplinary examination of healthy cognitive ageing

et al. 2014

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BackgroundAs greater numbers of us are living longer, it is increasingly important to understand how we can age healthily. Although old age is often stereotyped as a time of declining mental abilities and inflexibility, cognitive neuroscience reveals that older adults use neural and cognitive resources flexibly, recruiting novel neural regions and cognitive processes when necessary. Our aim in this project is to understand how age-related changes to neural structure and function interact to support cognitive abilities across the lifespan.Methods/DesignWe are recruiting a population-based cohort of 3000 adults aged 18 and over into Stage 1 of the project, where they complete an interview including health and lifestyle questions, a core cognitive assessment, and a self-completed questionnaire of lifetime experiences and physical activity. Of those interviewed, 700 participants aged 18-87 (100 per age decile) continue to Stage 2 where they undergo cognitive testing and provide measures of brain structure and function. Cognition is assessed across multiple domains including attention and executive control, language, memory, emotion, action control and learning. A subset of 280 adults return for in-depth neurocognitive assessment in Stage 3, using functional neuroimaging experiments across our key cognitive domains.Formal statistical models will be used to examine the changes that occur with healthy ageing, and to evaluate age-related reorganisation in terms of cognitive and neural functions invoked to compensate for overall age-related brain structural decline. Taken together the three stages provide deep phenotyping that will allow us to measure neural activity and flexibility during performance across a number of core cognitive functions. This approach offers hypothesis-driven insights into the relationship between brain and behaviour in healthy ageing that are relevant to the general population.DiscussionOur study is a unique resource of neuroimaging and cognitive measures relevant to change across the adult lifespan. Because we focus on normal age-related changes, our results may contribute to changing views about the ageing process, lead to targeted interventions, and reveal how normal ageing relates to frail ageing in clinicopathological conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.

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Section: Research Method: Materials and Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) study protocol: a cross-sectional, lifespan, multidisciplinary examination of healthy cognitive ageing

et al. 2014

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“…A similar reexamination may be necessary for subitizing limits 98 . Finally, resource model approaches have now begun to be applied to a range of issues in neuroscience, such as working memory development 99 , aging 77,100 and pathology 78 , where changes in memory quality may have a vital and previously overlooked role.…”

Section: Open Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changing concepts of working memory

2014

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Working memory is widely considered to be limited in capacity, holding a fixed, small number of items, such as Miller's ‘magical number’ seven or Cowan's four. It has recently been proposed that working memory might better be conceptualized as a limited resource that is distributed flexibly among all items to be maintained in memory. According to this view, the quality rather than the quantity of working memory representations determines performance. Here we consider behavioral and emerging neural evidence for this proposal.

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“…Examples include timing [16], brightness [17], hue [18], and colour [19] of visual stimuli; tactile/kinesthetic stimuli providing information about the roughness, shape, and weight of objects, as well as the position and trajectory of body parts [18], [20], [21]; and timing [16], [17], pitch [17], [18], and intensity [17] of auditory stimuli. Sensory discrimination and acuity decrement during aging and, interestingly, these changes in perceptual processing may have a causal influence on age-related decrements in intelligence and performance on cognitive tasks, such as short-term memory [22], [23].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Genetic Pleiotropy Explains Associations between Musical Auditory Discrimination and Intelligence

et al. 2014

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Musical aptitude is commonly measured using tasks that involve discrimination of different types of musical auditory stimuli. Performance on such different discrimination tasks correlates positively with each other and with intelligence. However, no study to date has explored these associations using a genetically informative sample to estimate underlying genetic and environmental influences. In the present study, a large sample of Swedish twins (N = 10,500) was used to investigate the genetic architecture of the associations between intelligence and performance on three musical auditory discrimination tasks (rhythm, melody and pitch). Phenotypic correlations between the tasks ranged between 0.23 and 0.42 (Pearson r values). Genetic modelling showed that the covariation between the variables could be explained by shared genetic influences. Neither shared, nor non-shared environment had a significant effect on the associations. Good fit was obtained with a two-factor model where one underlying shared genetic factor explained all the covariation between the musical discrimination tasks and IQ, and a second genetic factor explained variance exclusively shared among the discrimination tasks. The results suggest that positive correlations among musical aptitudes result from both genes with broad effects on cognition, and genes with potentially more specific influences on auditory functions.

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Normal aging increases discriminal dispersion in visuospatial short-term memory.

Cited by 28 publications

References 87 publications

The Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) study protocol: a cross-sectional, lifespan, multidisciplinary examination of healthy cognitive ageing

The Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) study protocol: a cross-sectional, lifespan, multidisciplinary examination of healthy cognitive ageing

Changing concepts of working memory

Genetic Pleiotropy Explains Associations between Musical Auditory Discrimination and Intelligence

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