Aging effects in sequential modulations of poorer-strategy effects during execution of memory strategies

Strategy Use Mediates the Relation between Openness to Experience and Episodic Memory in Younger and Older Adults

Previous research has shown that people with higher levels of Openness to Experience show higher levels of cognitive functioning. However, the mechanisms underlying this personality-cognition relation are not well understood. The goal of the current project was to examine whether strategy use mediates the relation between Openness to experience and retrospective memory, and whether the role of strategy use in the Openness-memory relation was the same in younger and older adults.

METHOD

Two studies were conducted. In each of them, younger and older adults were administered a retrospective memory task (29 younger and 27 older in Study 1, 43 adults of all ages in Study 2). They were asked to report the strategies they used during the task, and to complete an Openness to Experience scale.

RESULTS

Consistent with previous reports, higher scores of Openness to experience and greater use of efficient memory strategies were associated with higher levels of memory performance. In addition, individual differences in memory strategy use mostly mediated the relation between Openness and memory performance. Results did not support a mediation model moderated by age. That is, the role of memory strategy use in the relation between Openness and memory was the same in younger and older adults.

CONCLUSION

Higher levels of Openness are associated with better memory performance, mostly because people with higher levels of Openness use more efficient memory strategies.

Do Musicians Have Better Mnemonic and Executive Performance Than Actors? Influence of Regular Musical or Theater Practice in Adults and in the Elderly

The effects of musical practice on cognition are well established yet rarely compared with other kinds of artistic training or expertise. This study aims to compare the possible effect of musical and theater regular practice on cognition across the lifespan. Both of these artistic activities require many hours of individual or collective training in order to reach an advanced level. This process requires the interaction between higher-order cognitive functions and several sensory modalities (auditory, verbal, visual and motor), as well as regular learning of new pieces. This study included participants with musical or theater practice, and healthy controls matched for age (18–84 years old) and education. The objective was to determine whether specific practice in these activities had an effect on cognition across the lifespan, and a protective influence against undesirable cognitive outcomes associated with aging. All participants underwent a battery of cognitive tasks that evaluated processing speed, executive function, fluency, working memory, verbal and visual long-term memories, and non-verbal reasoning abilities. Results showed that music and theater artistic practices were strongly associated with cognitive enhancements. Participants with musical practice were better in executive functioning, working memory and non-verbal reasoning, whereas participants with regular acting practice had better long-term verbal memory and fluency performance. Thus, taken together, results suggest a differential effect of these artistic practices on cognition across the lifespan. Advanced age did not seem to reduce the benefit, so future studies should focus on the hypothetical protective effects of artistic practice against cognitive decline.

Strategy variability in numerosity comparison task: a study in young and older adults

We investigated strategies used by young and older adults in dot comparison tasks to further our understanding of mechanisms underlying numerosity discrimination and age-related differences therein. The participants were shown a series of two dot collections and asked to select the largest collection. Analyses of verbal protocols collected on each trial, solution times, and percentages of errors documented the strategy repertoire and strategy distribution in young and older adults. Based on visual features of dot collections, both young and older adults used a set of 9 strategies and selected strategies on a trial-by-trial basis. The findings also documented age-related differences (i.e., strategy preferences) and similarities (e.g., number of strategies used by individuals) in strategies and performance. Strategy variability found here has important implications for understanding numerosity comparison and contrasts with previous findings suggesting that participants use a single strategy when they compare dot collections.

Aging and Sequential Strategy Interference: A Magnetoencephalography Study in Arithmetic Problem Solving

This study investigated age-related changes in the neural bases of sequential strategy interference. Sequential strategy interference refers to decreased strategy interference (i.e., poorer performance when the cued strategy is not the best) after executing a poorer strategy relative to after a better strategy. Young and older adults performed a computational estimation task (e.g., providing approximate products to two-digit multiplication problems, like 38 × 74) and were matched on behavioral sequential strategy interference effects. Analyses of magnetoencephalography (MEG) data revealed differences between young and older adults in brain activities underlying sequential strategy interference. More specifically, relative to young adults, older adults showed additional recruitments in frontal, temporal, and parietal regions. Also, age-related differences were found in the temporal dynamics of brain activations, with modulations occurring both earlier and later in older than young adults. These results suggest that highly functioning older adults rely on additional mechanisms to process sequential strategy interference as efficiently as young adults. Our findings inform mechanisms by which highly functioning older adults obtain as good performance as young adults, and suggest that these older adults may compensate deleterious effects of aging to efficiently execute arithmetic strategies.

Negative Aging Stereotypes Disrupt both the Selection and Execution of Strategies in Older Adults

BACKGROUND

Age-based cognitive deficits are exacerbated by stereotype threat effects (i.e., the threat of being judged as cognitively incapable due to aging). We tested whether age-based stereotype threat effects can occur via impair- ing older adults' ability to select the best strategy and/or to execute strategies efficiently.

METHODS

Older adults (age range: 64.3-89.5 years) were randomly assigned to a stereotype threat or control condition before taking an episodic memory task. They encoded pairs of concrete words and of abstract words, with either a repetition or an imagery strategy, and then took a cued-recall task. Whereas participants in experiment 1 could choose between these two strategies, those of experiment 2 were forced to use either the repetition or the imagery strategy.

RESULTS

Our findings showed that age-based stereotype threat disrupts both the selection and execution of the most efficient, but also most resource-demanding, imagery strategy, and that these stereotype threat effects were stronger on concrete words.

CONCLUSION

Our findings have important implications to further understand age-based (and other) stereotype threat effects, and how noncognitive factors modulate age-related changes in human cognition.

Strategy difficulty effects in young and older adults' episodic memory are modulated by inter-stimulus intervals and executive control processes

Efficient execution of strategies is crucial to memory performance and to age-related differences in this performance. Relative strategy complexity influences memory performance and aging effects on memory. Here, we aimed to further our understanding of the effects of relative strategy complexity by looking at the role of cognitive control functions and the time-course of the effects of relative strategy complexity. Thus, we manipulated inter-stimulus intervals (ISI) and assessed executive functions. Results showed that (a) performance as a function of the relative strategy difficulty of the current and previous trial was modulated by ISI, (b) these effects were modulated by inhibition capacities, and (c) significant age differences were found in the way ISI modulates relative strategy difficulty. These findings have important implications for understanding the relationships between aging, executive control, and strategy execution in episodic memory.