Understanding How Prior Knowledge Influences Memory in Older Adults

Lifespan differences in hippocampal subregion connectivity patterns during movie watching

Age-related episodic memory decline is attributed to functional alternations in the hippocampus. Less clear is how aging affects the functional connections of the hippocampus to the rest of the brain during episodic memory processing. We examined fMRI data from the CamCAN dataset, in which a large cohort of participants watched a movie (N = 643; 18-88 years), a proxy for naturalistic episodic memory encoding. We examined connectivity profiles across the lifespan both within the hippocampus (anterior, posterior), and between the hippocampal subregions and cortical networks. Aging was associated with reductions in contralateral (left, right) but not ipsilateral (anterior, posterior) hippocampal subregion connectivity. Aging was primarily associated with increased coupling between the anterior hippocampus and regions affiliated with Control, Dorsal Attention and Default Mode networks, yet decreased coupling between the posterior hippocampus and a selection of these regions. Differences in age-related hippocampal-cortical, but not within-hippocampus circuitry selectively predicted worse memory performance. Our findings comprehensively characterize hippocampal functional topography in relation to cognition in older age, suggesting that shifts in cortico-hippocampal connectivity may be sensitive markers of age-related episodic memory decline.

How schema knowledge influences memory in older adults: Filling in the gaps, or leading memory astray?

Age-related declines in episodic memory do not affect all types of mnemonic information equally: when to-be-remembered information is in line with one's prior knowledge, or schema-congruent, older adults often show no impairments. There are two major accounts of this effect: One proposes that schemas compensate for memory failures in aging, and the other proposes that schemas instead actively impair older adults' otherwise intact memory for incongruent information. However, the evidence thus far is inconclusive, likely due to methodological constraints in teasing apart these complex underlying dynamics. We developed a paradigm that separately examines the contributions of underlying memory and schema knowledge to a final memory decision, allowing these dynamics to be examined directly. In the present study, healthy older and younger adults first searched for target objects in congruent or incongruent locations within scenes. In a subsequent test, participants indicated where in each scene the target had been located previously, and provided confidence-based recognition memory judgments that indexed underlying memory, in terms of recollection and familiarity, for the background scenes. We found that age-related increases in schema effects on target location spatial recall were predicted and statistically mediated by age-related increases in underlying memory failures, specifically within recollection. We also found that, relative to younger adults, older adults had poorer spatial memory precision within recollected scenes but slightly better precision within familiar scenes-and age increases in schema bias were primarily exhibited within recollected scenes. Interestingly, however, there were also slight age-related increases in schema effects that could not be explained by memory deficits alone, outlining a role for active schema influences as well. Together, these findings support the account that age-related schema effects on memory are compensatory in that they are driven primarily by underlying memory failures, and further suggest that age-related deficits in memory precision may also drive schema effects.

Links Between Daily Life and Laboratory Emotion Regulation Processes: The Role of Age and Cognitive Status

OBJECTIVES

This study investigates how daily use of emotion regulation (ER) strategies predicts ER processes in the laboratory among young adults and cognitively diverse older adults.

METHODS

Young adults (aged 21-34, n = 66), cognitively normal (CN) older adults (aged 70-83, n = 87), and older adults with researcher-defined mild cognitive impairment (MCI; aged 70-84; n = 58) completed an experience sampling procedure (7×/day for 9 days) reporting their distraction and reappraisal use in daily life. In a laboratory task inducing high-arousal negative emotion, they reported their (a) distraction and reappraisal use when instructed to reduce negative emotion and (b) ER success and perceptions when randomly assigned to regulate using distraction or reappraisal.

RESULTS

Among CN older adults, a higher frequency of using a strategy in daily life predicted greater success deploying the strategy when instructed to do so but was unrelated to spontaneous strategy use in the laboratory. In contrast, among older adults with researcher-defined MCI, greater daily life strategy use predicted greater laboratory use, but not greater success. Daily strategy use in younger adults was unrelated to strategy use and success in the laboratory. Older adults with researcher-defined MCI experienced ER as more demanding but did not differ from non-impaired individuals in terms of perceived ER effort.

DISCUSSION

Cognitively normal older adults may be better able to leverage their ER experience in novel contexts than younger adults. Older adults with MCI may be motivated to manage their emotions but experience more ER difficulty, perhaps in part due to reliance on default strategies.

Health and Financial Literacy and the Acquisition of COVID-19 Knowledge in Older Adults

Knowledge about COVID-19 enters into many aspects of decision making, especially for older people who are at increased risk of severe disease or death. Yet little is known about the resources that supported older people's uptake of COVID-19 knowledge. Here, we hypothesized that higher pre-pandemic health and financial literacy was associated with higher COVID-19 knowledge. Participants were 434 community-based older people without dementia. COVID-19 knowledge was assessed via a 5-item measure, and health and financial literacy was assessed via a 32-item measure. In an ordinal regression model adjusted for age, gender, and education, higher literacy was associated with higher COVID-19 knowledge (p < .0001), and this association persisted after further adjusting for robust measures of global cognition or one of five specific cognitive domains (all p's ≤ .0001). These findings suggest that literacy plays a key role in supporting older people's acquisition of impactful knowledge in the real world.

Shift happens: aging alters the content but not the organization of memory for complex events

While cognitive aging research has compared episodic memory accuracy between younger and older adults, less work has described differences in how memories are encoded and recalled. This is important for memories of real-world experiences, since there is immense variability in which details can be accessed and organized into narratives. We investigated age effects on the organization and content of memory for complex events. In two independent samples (N = 45; 60), young and older adults encoded and recalled the same short-movie. We applied a novel scoring on the recollections to quantify recall accuracy, temporal organization (temporal contiguity, forward asymmetry), and content (perceptual, conceptual). No age-effects on recall accuracy nor on metrics of temporal organization emerged. Older adults provided more conceptual and non-episodic content, whereas younger adults reported a higher proportion of event-specific information. Our results indicate that age-related differences in episodic recall reflect distinctions in what details are assembled from the past.

Scene construction in healthy aging - Exploring the interplay between task complexity and oculomotor behaviour

Mounting evidence indicates a close correspondence between episodic memory, mental imagery, and oculomotor behaviour. It remains unclear, however, how oculomotor variables support endogenously driven forms of mental imagery and how this relationship changes across the adult lifespan. In this study we investigated age-related changes in oculomotor signatures during scene construction and explored how task complexity impacts these processes. Younger and cognitively healthy older participants completed a guided scene construction paradigm where scene complexity was manipulated according to the number of elements to be sequentially integrated. We recorded participants' eye movements and collected subjective ratings regarding their phenomenological experience. Overall, older adults rated their constructions as more vivid and more spatially integrated, while also generating more fixations and saccades relative to the younger group, specifically on control trials. Analyses of participants' total scan paths revealed that, in the early stages of scene construction, oculomotor behaviour changed as a function of task complexity within each group. Following the introduction of a second stimulus, older but not younger adults showed a significant decrease in the production of eye movements. Whether this shift in oculomotor behaviour serves a compensatory function to bolster task performance represents an important question for future research.

Time spent imagining does not influence younger and older adults' episodic simulation of helping behavior

Shared cognitive processes underlie our ability to remember the past (i.e., episodic memory) and imagine the future (i.e., episodic simulation) and age-related declines in episodic memory are also noted when simulating future scenarios. Given older adults' reduced cognitive control and protracted memory retrieval time, we examined whether imposing time limits on episodic simulation of future helping scenarios affects younger and older adults' willingness to help, phenomenological experience, and the type of details produced. Relative to a control task, episodic simulation increased younger and older participants' willingness to help, scene vividness, and perspective-taking regardless of the time spent imagining future helping scenarios. Notably, time spent imagining influenced the number, but not proportion of internal details produced, suggesting that participants' use of episodic-like information remained consistent regardless of the time they spent imagining. The present findings highlight the importance of collecting phenomenological experience when assessing episodic simulation abilities across the lifespan.

Prediction error and memory across the lifespan

The influence of Prediction Errors (PEs) on episodic memory has generated growing empirical and theoretical interest. This review explores how the relationship between PE and memory may evolve throughout lifespan. Drawing upon the predictive processing framework and the Predictive, Interactive Multiple Memory System (PIMMS) model in particular, the paper highlights the hierarchical organization of memory systems and the interaction between top-down predictions and bottom-up sensory input, proposing that PEs promote synaptic change and improve encoding and consolidation processes. We discuss the neuroscientific mechanisms underlying PE-driven memory enhancement, focusing on the involvement of the hippocampus, the entorhinal cortex-hippocampus pathway, and the noradrenergic sympathetic system. Recognizing the divergent trajectories of episodic and semantic memory across the lifespan is crucial when examining the effects of PEs on memory. This review underscores the heterogeneity of memory processes and neurocognitive mechanisms underlying PE-driven memory enhancement across age. Future research is suggested to directly compare neural networks involved in learning from PEs across different age groups and to contribute to a deeper understanding of PE-driven learning across age.

Effects of Aging on Successful Object Encoding: Enhanced Semantic Representations Compensate for Impaired Visual Representations

Although episodic memory and visual processing decline substantially with healthy aging, semantic knowledge is generally spared. There is evidence that older adults' spared semantic knowledge can support episodic memory. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) combined with representational similarity analyses (RSAs) to examine how novel visual and preexisting semantic representations at encoding predict subjective memory vividness at retrieval. Eighteen young and seventeen older adults (female and male participants) encoded images of objects during fMRI scanning and recalled these images while rating the vividness of their memories. After scanning, participants discriminated between studied images and similar lures. RSA based on a deep convolutional neural network and normative concept feature data were used to link patterns of neural activity during encoding to visual and semantic representations. Relative to young adults, the specificity of activation patterns for visual features was reduced in older adults, consistent with dedifferentiation. However, the specificity of activation patterns for semantic features was enhanced in older adults, consistent with hyperdifferentiation. Despite dedifferentiation, visual representations in early visual cortex (EVC) predicted high memory vividness in both age groups. In contrast, semantic representations in lingual gyrus (LG) and fusiform gyrus (FG) were associated with high memory vividness only in the older adults. Intriguingly, data suggests that older adults with lower specificity of visual representations in combination with higher specificity of semantic representations tended to rate their memories as more vivid. Our findings suggest that memory vividness in aging relies more on semantic representations over anterior regions, potentially compensating for age-related dedifferentiation of visual information in posterior regions.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Normal aging is associated with impaired memory for events while semantic knowledge might even improve. We investigated the effects of aging on the specificity of visual and semantic information in the brain when viewing common objects and how this information enables subsequent memory vividness for these objects. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) combined with modeling of the stimuli we found that visual information was represented with less specificity in older than young adults while still supporting memory vividness. In contrast semantic information supported memory vividness only in older adults and especially in those individuals that had the lowest specificity of visual information. These findings provide evidence for a spared semantic memory system increasingly recruited to compensate for degraded visual representations in older age.

Knowledge-based intervention improves older adult recognition memory for novel activity, but not event segmentation or temporal order memory

Although episodic memory declines with age, older adults are often able to make use of relevant knowledge to support episodic memory. More specifically, prior knowledge may support the perception of meaningful events through the process of event segmentation. We sought to test whether increasing older adults' knowledge for novel activities (i.e., Tai chi, making gyozas) would improve segmentation and memory. We conducted an online, pre-registered intervention in which eighty older adults were recruited based on being novices in each of the targeted activities. Participants completed segmentation and memory tests before and after being randomly assigned to one of two interactive virtual workshops (learning how to practice Tai chi or make gyozas). Each workshop consisted of two one-hour sessions during which an expert provided information about the activity and demonstrated it in a step-by-step fashion. We found that the intervention led to increased learning and recognition memory for the trained activity; however, there were no significant improvements in segmentation behavior, free recall, or memory of sequential information. These findings indicate that either more knowledge training is necessary to affect segmentation, or that segmentation is guided by perceptual features in the environment rather than one's conceptual understanding of the activity.

Conceptual relatedness promotes memory generalization at the cost of detailed recollection

An adaptive memory system is one that allows us to both retrieve detailed memories as well as generalize knowledge about our past, the latter termed memory generalization and is useful for making inferences about new situations. Research has indicated that memory generalization relies on forming knowledge structures by integrating experiences with shared encountered elements. Whether memory generalization occurs more readily when  experiences also have elements that share established (conceptual) information is less clear. It is also unclear if engaging in memory generalization during learning comes at the cost of retrieving detailed memories, the other function of episodic memory. To address these two knowledge gaps, we paired a modified version of the acquired equivalence task with a recognition memory test. Across three experiments, participants first learned a series of overlapping object-scene pairs (A-X, B-X and A-Y) in which half of the overlapping pairs contained conceptually-related objects (e.g., A-pencil; B-scissors; conceptual condition) and the other half contained unrelated objects (neutral condition). Participants ability to generalize to new overlapping object-scene pairs (B-Y) as well as not-learned but semantically-related objects was measured. Finally, participants completed a recognition memory test that included the encoded objects, perceptually similar lures or new foil objects. Across all experiments, we found higher rates of generalization but reduced detailed memory (indexed by increased false alarms to lure objects) for information learned in the conceptual than neutral condition. These results suggest the presence of conceptual knowledge biases an individual towards a generalization function of memory, which comes at the expense of detailed recollection.

Aging attenuates the memory advantage for unexpected objects in real-world scenes

Across the adult lifespan memory processes are subject to pronounced changes. Prior knowledge and expectations might critically shape functional differences; however, corresponding findings have remained ambiguous so far. Here, we chose a tailored approach to scrutinize how schema (in-)congruencies affect older and younger adults' memory for objects embedded in real-world scenes, a scenario close to everyday life memory demands. A sample of 23 older (52-81 years) and 23 younger adults (18-38 years) freely viewed 60 photographs of scenes in which target objects were included that were either congruent or incongruent with the given context information. After a delay, recognition performance for those objects was determined. In addition, recognized objects had to be matched to the scene context in which they were previously presented. While we found schema violations beneficial for object recognition across age groups, the advantage was significantly less pronounced in older adults. We moreover observed an age-related congruency bias for matching objects to their original scene context. Our findings support a critical role of predictive processes for age-related memory differences and indicate enhanced weighting of predictions with age. We suggest that recent predictive processing theories provide a particularly useful framework to elaborate on age-related functional vulnerabilities as well as stability.

Development of the Virtual Kitchen Protocol for Prospective Memory: a virtual reality-based measure of everyday prospective memory abilities

INTRODUCTION

Prospective memory is the ability to remember to accomplish a task at a specified point in the future. While this cognitive ability has a large impact on daily functioning, it is rarely assessed during neuropsychological evaluations. Furthermore, existing clinical prospective memory measures are few in number and have significant limitations, including applicability to everyday functioning and appropriate norming for older adulthood. There are also many gaps in the literature on prospective memory, such as how environmental factors affect performance across the lifespan.

METHOD

In the current study, we develop and establish a new virtual reality-based measure of prospective memory, the Virtual Kitchen Protocol for Prospective Memory. Young adults (ages 18-29; n = 56), healthy older adults (ages 60-90; n = 94), and clinical older adults (ages 62-90; n = 30) were compared on their performances on both the developed virtual reality prospective memory test and a parallel paper-and-pencil prospective memory test to investigate the impact of test environment across participant group.

RESULTS

The Virtual Kitchen Protocol for Prospective Memory was found to adequately differentiate between young adult, healthy older adult, and clinical older adult populations - suggesting baseline ability for prospective memory assessment in clinical settings with older adults and potential for future improvement of neuropsychological evaluations. Additionally, the developed virtual prospective memory task appeared to mimic environmental factors in everyday life but did not replicate the benefit previously measured in healthy older adults' prospective memory ability in naturalistic settings.

CONCLUSIONS

Overall, the current study built upon extant knowledge of prospective memory in both normal and abnormal aging, suggesting future directions in replicating familiar home environments. Findings provided additional evidence toward future validation of virtual reality assessment tools in clinical neuropsychological evaluations of cognitive abilities, such as prospective memory, with both healthy and clinical older adult populations.

Implicit measures of anthropomorphism: affective priming and recognition of apparent animal emotions

It has long been recognized that humans tend to anthropomorphize. That is, we naturally and effortlessly interpret the behaviors of nonhuman agents in the same way we interpret human behaviors. This tendency has only recently become a subject of empirical research. Most of this work uses explicit measures. Participants are asked whether they attribute some human-like trait to a nonhuman agent on some scale. These measures, however, have two limitations. First, they do not capture automatic components of anthropomorphism. Second, they generally only track one anthropomorphic result: the attribution (or non-attribution) of a particular trait. However, anthropomorphism can affect how we interpret animal behavior in other ways as well. For example, the grin of a nonhuman primate often looks to us like a smile, but it actually signals a state more like fear or anxiety. In the present work, we tested for implicit components of anthropomorphism based on an affective priming paradigm. Previous work suggests that priming with human faces displaying emotional expressions facilitated categorization of words into congruent emotion categories. In Experiments 1-3, we primed participants with images of nonhuman animals that appear to express happy or sad emotions, and asked participants to categorize words as positive or negative. Experiment 4 used human faces as control. Overall, we found consistent priming congruency effects in accuracy but not response time. These appeared to be more robust in older adults. They also appear to emerge with more processing time, and the pattern was the same with human as with primate faces. This demonstrates a role for automatic processes of emotion recognition in anthropomorphism. It also provides a potential measure for further exploration of implicit anthropomorphism.

Older adults recover more marginal knowledge and use feedback more effectively than younger adults: evidence using "I don't know" vs. "I don't remember" for general knowledge questions

Through three experiments, we examined older and younger adults' metacognitive ability to distinguish between what is not stored in the knowledge base versus merely inaccessible. Difficult materials were selected to test this ability when retrieval failures were very frequent. Of particular interest was the influence of feedback (and lack thereof) in potential new learning and recovery of marginal knowledge across age groups. Participants answered short-answer general knowledge questions, responding "I do not know" (DK) or "I do not remember" (DR) when retrieval failed. After DKs, performance on a subsequent multiple-choice (Exp. 1) and short-answer test following correct-answer feedback (Exp. 2) was lower than after DRs, supporting self-reported not remembering reflects failures of accessibility whereas not knowing captures a lack of availability. Yet, older adults showed a tendency to answer more DK questions correctly on the final tests than younger adults. Experiment 3 was a replication and extension of Experiment 2 including two groups of online participants in which one group was not provided correct answer feedback during the initial short-answer test. This allowed us to examine the degree to which any new learning and recovery of access to marginal knowledge was occurring across the age groups. Together, the findings indicate that (1) metacognitive awareness regarding underlying causes of retrieval failures is maintained across different distributions of knowledge accessibility, (2) older adults use correct answer feedback more effectively than younger adults, and (3) in the absence of feedback, older adults spontaneously recover marginal knowledge.

Lay Definitions of Intelligence, Knowledge, and Memory: Inter- and Independence of Constructs

The present study examined how lay participants define the following concepts used widely in psychology: being intelligent, knowing, and remembering. In the scientific community, knowledge overlaps with the contents of semantic memory, crystallized intelligence reflects the accumulation of knowledge, knowledge and event memory interact, and fluid intelligence and working memory correlate. Naturally, the lay public has implicit theories of these constructs. These theories mainly distinguish between intelligent and unintelligent behaviors and tend to include characteristics outside psychometric studies of intelligence, such as emotional intelligence. Here, we asked lay participants from the online platform Prolific to explain "what does being intelligent mean to you?" as well as "knowing" and "remembering" to understand their degree of alignment with theoretical conceptualizations in the research community. Qualitative coding of participant definitions showed that intelligence and knowledge are closely related, but asymmetrically-when defining what it means to be intelligent, participants reference knowledge, but intelligence is not considered in explaining knowing. Although participants note that intelligence is multi-faceted and related to problem-solving, there is an emphasis (in terms of frequency of mentions) on the crystallized side of intelligence (i.e., knowledge). A deeper understanding of lay participants' mental models of these constructs (i.e., their metacognitions) is essential for bridging gaps between experts and the general public.

One Dose Is Not Enough: The Beneficial Effect of Corrective COVID-19 Information Is Diminished If Followed by Misinformation

The World Health Organization (WHO) released a series of mythbuster infographics to combat misinformation during the COVID-19 infodemic. While the corrective effects of such debunking interventions have typically been examined in the immediate aftermath of intervention delivery; the durability of these corrective effects and their resilience against subsequent misinformation remains poorly understood. To this end, we asked younger and older adults to rate the truthfulness and credibility of 10 statements containing misinformation about common COVID-19 myths, as well as their willingness to share the statements through social media. They did this three times, before and after experimental interventions within a single study session. In keeping with established findings, exposure to the WHO's myth-busting infographics-(a) improved participants' ratings of the misinformation statements as untruthful and uncredible and (b) reduced their reported willingness to share the statements. However, within-subject data revealed these beneficial effects were diminished if corrective information was presented shortly by misinformation, but the effects remained when further corrective information was presented. Throughout the study, younger adults rated the misinformation statements as more truthful and credible and were more willing to share them. Our data reveal that the benefit of COVID-19 debunking interventions may be short-lived if followed shortly by misinformation. Still, the effect can be maintained in the presence of further corrective information. These outcomes provide insights into the effectiveness and durability of corrective information and can influence strategies for tackling health-related misinformation, especially in younger adults.

Ecological validity of don't remember and don't know for distinguishing accessibility- versus availability-based retrieval failures in older and younger adults: knowledge for news events

With pursuit of incremental progress and generalizability of findings in mind, we examined a possible boundary for older and younger adults' metacognitive distinction between what is not stored in memory versus merely inaccessible with materials that are not process pure to knowledge or events: information regarding news events. Participants were asked questions about public events such as celebrity news, tragedies, and political events that were widely experienced in the previous 10-12 years, responding "I don't know" (DK) or "I don't remember" (DR) when retrieval failed. Memories of these events are relatively recently acquired in rich, naturalistic contexts and are likely not fully separated from episodic details. When retrieval failed, DR items were recognized with higher accuracy than DK items, both immediately and 2 years later, confirming that self-reported not remembering reflects failures of accessibility, whereas not knowing better captures a lack of availability. In fact, older adults distinguished between the causes of retrieval failures more precisely than younger adults. Together, these findings advance the reliability, validity, and generalizability of using DR and DK as a metacognitive tool to address the phenomenological experience and behavioral consequences of retrieval failures of information that contains both semantic and episodic features. Implications for metacognition in aging and related constructs like familiarity, remembering, and knowing are discussed.

Event boundaries structure the contents of long-term memory in younger and older adults

Event boundaries impose structure on how events are stored in long-term memory. Research with young adults has shown that associations within events are stronger than those that cross event boundaries. Recently, this effect was observed in both young and old adults using movie stimuli (Davis, Chemnitz, et al., 2021). Here, we test whether this effect extends to written narratives. Young and old participants read a series of narratives that were interspersed with temporal shifts in the storyline meant to elicit the perception of an event boundary. Later, participants were cued with sentences and were asked to recall the sentence that immediately followed. We expected participants would have worse memory when a cue and correct answer flanked a boundary than when it did not. In Experiment 1, we found that despite older adults' lower performance overall, both age groups had lower accuracy for cues that flanked a boundary, compared to cues that elicited a response from within the same event. Experiment 2 replicated the results from Experiment 1. Our results support past work that did not find age differences in event perception and demonstrate that older and younger adults may store events similarly in long-term memory.

Episodic memory updating among older adults: moderating role of prior knowledge

Memory updating is an adaptive function that requires people's registry of changes of episodes. However, the research on the role of prior knowledge on memory updating among older adults is scant. We instructed young and older adults to learn two sets of pairs with overlapping scene (A) on Day 1 (A-B) and Day 2 (A-C) and tested the competing memories on Day 3. We further manipulated the schema-congruency between item (B/C) and scene (A). Young adults performed comparatively well in the A-B and A-C memory tests, and showed no difference under different congruency conditions. However, memory updating among older adults was moderated by prior knowledge, with better memory performance in A-C test relative to A-B test when the to-be-updated item C was schema-congruent, however, with poorer memory performance in the A-C test when the to-be-updated item is schema-incongruent. This study advances the understanding that prior knowledge significantly contributes to memory updating among older adults. They would experience retroactive interference when the to-be-updated memories were consistent with their prior knowledge, yet proactive interference when the to-be-updated memories were inconsistent with their prior knowledge. Meanwhile, prior knowledge among young adults does not affect memory updating, given that their memory patterns are consistent across congruency conditions.

Age Effects on Old/New Recognition Memory Involving Abstract Figures and Non-words

Age-related memory problems posit a growing concern in our society. This study investigated the impact of age and memory strength on recognition memory of pre-experimentally unfamiliar abstract figures and non-words. We applied a three-phase old/new recognition memory paradigm and manipulated memory strength as a function of the Levels of Processing (deep vs. shallow) and repetition. Older adults relative to the young showed impairment in the correct identification of new items. As indicated by the lower discriminability indexes, the older adults also had difficulties discriminating the strongly (drawn/semantically processed) and the weakly (studied) embedded abstract figures but not the non-words. Age-related differences in reaction times were only evident with the abstract figures. Finally, our results revealed that the recognition performance was equally affected by memory strength in both age groups. The current findings agree with previous research on age-related impairment in new item recognition, which can be attributed to misrecollection and decreased sensitivity to novelty in the older adults than the young. The detected age effects on the discriminability of the drawn and studied abstract figures agree with the age-related impairment in the perceptual encoding hypothesis and support the notion related to the need for environmental support to reduce age effects. The lack of age effects with the non-words indicates that age effects on discriminability are stimulus-dependent. The current results support the notion that recognition memory in aging is only impaired under certain conditions and depends on the stimuli used.

Reducing age-related Memory Deficits: The Roles of Environmental Support and self-initiated Processing Activities

BACKGROUND

The notion that memory performance in older adults can be boosted by information provided by the environment was proposed by Craik (1983). The suggestion was that age-related memory deficits can be attenuated and sometimes even eliminated by a complementary combination of environmental support and consciously controlled self-initiated activities.

OBJECTIVE

The objective of the present article was to review the subsequent empirical and theoretical work on the topics of environmental support and self-initiated ativities as they relate to the effects of aging on human memory.

DISCUSSION

The notion of schematic support from the person's knowledge base is introduced and its relevance discussed. In addition, the effects of various types of support on encoding and retrieval processes in older adults are desribed, and the increasing theoretical importance of executive processes in reducing age-related memory deficits is discussed.

CONCLUSION

As one main conclusion, it is suggested that self-initiated control processes interact with both information provided by the environment and by the person's knowledge base to improve the effectiveness of encoding and retrieval processing in older adults.

A Double-Edged Sword: The Role of Prior Knowledge in Memory Aging

Introduction

People accumulate knowledge throughout their lifespan and the accumulated knowledge influences how we encode and retrieve information in memory processing. This study aims to investigate the role of knowledge in associative memory across the adult lifespan, and specifically examines the effects of two material properties that interact with prior knowledge: congruency – whether the material is congruent with people’s prior knowledge, and ambiguity – whether the material is ambiguous to interpret based on prior knowledge.

Method

273 participants (aged 22–70 years old) completed an incidental memory task online. Participants were shown pictures depicting an object in a scene and judged if the object was likely or unlikely to be in the particular scene. Later, in the recognition test, participants were asked to identify if the exact picture was presented earlier. The pictures were manipulated to have varying levels of congruency, meaning that some depicted likely object–scene pairs and some unlikely. We also measured how different the likely/unlikely judgment for each object–scene pair was across all participants to determine the ambiguity level of the object–scene pair: some were more likely to receive diverse responses across people, whereas others are unambiguously consistent (or inconsistent) with common knowledge shared by most people. We used mixed-effects logistic regressions to predict memory outcome for each trial as a function of age, age², congruency/ambiguity, and their interactions.

Results

The object–scene pairs perceived as congruent had higher hit rates than incongruent ones, as well as higher false alarm rates, especially in middle-aged and older people. Higher ambiguity was also related to both greater true and false memory, independent of age. Finally, the effect of ambiguity only emerged when the object–scene pair was perceived incongruent.

Discussion

The results suggest that people rely on prior knowledge to process new information and that this reliance improves hit responses, but also induces false memories particularly for middle-aged and older people, suggesting a double-edged role of knowledge in associative memory and its disproportionate influence on memory aging. Over-reliance on knowledge in older adults, which has been suspected in other cognitive processes, may be one of the mechanisms underlying associative memory decrease in aging.

Playing Games with Ais: The Limits of GPT-3 and Similar Large Language Models

This article contributes to the debate around the abilities of large language models such as GPT-3, dealing with: firstly, evaluating how well GPT does in the Turing Test, secondly the limits of such models, especially their tendency to generate falsehoods, and thirdly the social consequences of the problems these models have with truth-telling. We start by formalising the recently proposed notion of reversible questions, which Floridi & Chiriatti (2020) propose allow one to ‘identify the nature of the source of their answers’, as a probabilistic measure based on Item Response Theory from psychometrics. Following a critical assessment of the methodology which led previous scholars to dismiss GPT’s abilities, we argue against claims that GPT-3 completely lacks semantic ability. Using ideas of compression, priming, distributional semantics and semantic webs we offer our own theory of the limits of large language models like GPT-3, and argue that GPT can competently engage in various semantic tasks. The real reason GPT’s answers seem senseless being that truth-telling is not amongst them. We claim that these kinds of models cannot be forced into producing only true continuation, but rather to maximise their objective function they strategize to be plausible instead of truthful. This, we moreover claim, can hijack our intuitive capacity to evaluate the accuracy of its outputs. Finally, we show how this analysis predicts that a widespread adoption of language generators as tools for writing could result in permanent pollution of our informational ecosystem with massive amounts of very plausible but often untrue texts.

I remember therefore I am: Episodic memory retrieval and self-reported trait empathy judgments in young and older adults and individuals with medial temporal lobe excisions

How do we know what sort of people we are? Do we reflect on specific past instances of our own behaviour, or do we just have a general idea? Previous work has emphasized the role of personal semantic memory (general autobiographical knowledge) in how we assess our own personality traits. Using a standardized trait empathy questionnaire, we show in four experiments that episodic autobiographical memory (memory for specific personal events) is associated with people's judgments of their own trait empathy. Specifically, neurologically healthy young adults rated themselves as more empathic on questionnaire items that cued episodic memories of events in which they behaved empathically. This effect, however, was diminished in people who are known to have poor episodic memory: older adults and individuals who have undergone unilateral excision of medial temporal lobe tissue (as treatment for epilepsy). Further, self-report ratings on individual questionnaire items were generally predicted by subjectively rated phenomenological qualities of the memories cued by those items, such as sensory detail, scene coherence, and overall vividness. We argue that episodic and semantic memory play different roles with respect to self-knowledge depending on life experience, the integrity of the medial temporal lobes, and whether one is assessing general abstract traits versus more concrete behaviours that embody these traits. Future research should examine different types of self-knowledge as well as personality traits other than empathy.

An older adult advantage in autobiographical recall

This pre-registered online study aimed to measure the effect of environmental support on age-differences in autobiographical memory alongside memory for images. Young and older adults reported autobiographical memories about which they regularly thought (high environmental support through practice) or that were experimentally cued to be mundane (low environmental support). The support manipulation was also applied to descriptions of images that were produced whilst images remained on screen (high support) or produced from memory (low support). In line with existing theory, support disproportionately benefitted older adults in the quantity of information produced. However, analysis of the autobiographical descriptions showed no age deficit in reporting episodic detail, in contrast to much of the existing literature. A second group of young and older adults also evaluated the descriptions produced, and older adults' descriptions were consistently rated as higher quality than young adults' descriptions across several dimensions, such as vividness and clarity. An unplanned meta-analysis was conducted to assess if a publication bias existed in the literature favoring the reporting of age-deficits in producing episodic detail in autobiographical memory: there was no evidence for a bias and the modal result of age deficits was generally supported. A key distinction is that the current study was conducted online - evidence is presented to argue that older adults may perform better at autobiographical memory tasks outside the lab.

Temporal pole volume is associated with episodic autobiographical memory in healthy older adults

Recollection of personal past events differs across the lifespan. Older individuals recall fewer episodic details and convey more semantic information than young. Here we examine how gray matter volumes in temporal lobe regions integral to episodic and semantic memory (hippocampus and temporal poles, respectively) are related to age differences in autobiographical recollection. Gray matter volumes were obtained in healthy young (n = 158) and old (n = 105) adults. The temporal pole was demarcated and hippocampus segmented into anterior and posterior regions to test for volume differences between age groups. The Autobiographical Interview was administered to measure episodic and semantic autobiographical memory. Volume associations with episodic and semantic autobiographical memory were then assessed. Brain volumes were smaller for older adults in the posterior hippocampus. Autobiographical memory was less episodic and more semanticized for older versus younger adults. Older adults also showed positive associations between temporal pole volumes and episodic autobiographical recall; in the young, temporal pole volume was positively associated with performance on standard laboratory measures of semantic memory. Exploratory analyses revealed that age-related episodic autobiographical memory associations with anterior hippocampal volumes depended on sex. These findings suggest that age differences in brain structures implicated in episodic and semantic memory may portend reorganization of neural circuits to support autobiographical memory in later life.

Healthy Middle-Aged Adults Have Preserved Mnemonic Discrimination and Integration, While Showing No Detectable Memory Benefits

Declarative memory abilities change across adulthood. Semantic memory and autobiographic episodic knowledge can remain stable or even increase from mid- to late adulthood, while episodic memory abilities decline in later adulthood. Although it is well known that prior knowledge influences new learning, it is unclear whether the experiential growth of knowledge and memory traces across the lifespan may drive favorable adaptations in some basic memory processes. We hypothesized that an increased reliance on memory integration may be an adaptive mechanism to handle increased interference from accumulating memory traces and knowledge across adulthood. In turn, this may confer an improved ability for integration, observable in middle-age, before the onset of major aging-related declines. We further tested whether the hypothesized increase would be associated with previously observed reductions in memory discrimination performance in midlife. Data from a sample of healthy middle-aged (40-50 years, n = 40) and younger adults (20-28 years, n = 41) did not support the hypothesis of improved integration, as assessed by an associative inference paradigm. Instead, age-equivalent performance on both integration and discrimination measures were observed [Bayes factors (BFs)10 = 0.19-0.25], along with expected higher verbal knowledge and slower perceptual speed for middle-aged [(BFs)10 = 8.52-73.52]. The results contribute to an increased understanding of memory processing in midlife, an understudied portion of the lifespan, and suggest that two core episodic memory processes, integration and discrimination, can be maintained in healthy middle-aged adults.

The relationship between occupational stress, mental health and work ability of coal chemical workers in Xinjiang

OBJECTIVE

To understand the current working ability of coal chemical workers in Xinjiang, and analyze the impact of occupational stress, mental disorders, and their interaction on work ability. To provide a scientific basis for improving the working ability and quality of life of coal chemical workers.

METHODS

In this study, a stratified random sampling method was used to conduct a questionnaire survey of 1,400 workers in six coal mining enterprises from June to December 2019. The Effort-Reward Imbalance Questionnaire (ERI), the Symptoms Checklist 90 (SCL-90), and the Work Ability Index Scale (WAI) were used to evaluate the level of occupational stress, mental disorders, and the ability to work as coal chemical workers.

RESULTS

The results showed that WAI scores had statistically significant differences between gender, age, length of service, shift, education, marital status, and monthly income (P < 0.05). The ability to work and its dimensions were inversely correlated with occupational stress, and mental disorders (P < 0.001). Occupational stress and mental disorders are risk factors affecting the ability to work. Workers with high occupational stress^* mental disorders (OR = 10.666, 95% CI: 6.443-17.658) are 10.666 times more likely to be at risk for developing poor work ability than low occupational stress^* no mental disorders. Structural equation models show that occupational stress and mental health conditions had a direct impact on work ability, and mental health conditions were the mediators of the relationship between occupational stress and work ability.

CONCLUSION

Occupational stress, mental disorders, and their interaction are risk factors affecting the ability of coal chemical workers to work. Occupational stress can indirectly affect the ability to work through mental health conditions.

Evidence that ageing yields improvements as well as declines across attention and executive functions

Many but not all cognitive abilities decline during ageing. Some even improve due to lifelong experience. The critical capacities of attention and executive functions have been widely posited to decline. However, these capacities are composed of multiple components, so multifaceted ageing outcomes might be expected. Indeed, prior findings suggest that whereas certain attention/executive functions clearly decline, others do not, with hints that some might even improve. We tested ageing effects on the alerting, orienting and executive (inhibitory) networks posited by Posner and Petersen's influential theory of attention, in a cross-sectional study of a large sample (N = 702) of participants aged 58-98. Linear and nonlinear analyses revealed that whereas the efficiency of the alerting network decreased with age, orienting and executive inhibitory efficiency increased, at least until the mid-to-late 70s. Sensitivity analyses indicated that the patterns were robust. The results suggest variability in age-related changes across attention/executive functions, with some declining while others improve.

I remember it like it was yesterday: Age-related differences in the subjective experience of remembering

It has been frequently described that older adults subjectively report the vividness of their memories as being as high, or even higher, than young adults, despite poorer objective memory performance. Here, we review studies that examined age-related differences in the subjective experience of memory vividness. By examining vividness calibration and resolution, studies using different types of approaches converge to suggest that older adults overestimate the intensity of their vividness ratings relative to young adults, and that they rely on retrieved memory details to a lesser extent to judge vividness. We discuss potential mechanisms underlying these observations. Inflation of memory vividness with regard to the richness of memory content may stem from age-differences in vividness criterion or scale interpretation and psycho-social factors. The reduced reliance on episodic memory details in older adults may stem from age-related differences in how they monitor these details to make their vividness ratings. Considered together, these findings emphasize the importance of examining age-differences in memory vividness using different analytical methods and they provide valuable evidence that the subjective experience of remembering is more than the reactivation of memory content. In this vein, we recommend that future studies explore the links between memory vividness and other subjective memory scales (e.g., ratings of details or memory confidence) in healthy aging and/or other populations, as it could be used as a window to better characterize the cognitive processes that underpin the subjective assessment of the quality of recollected events.

From exploration to exploitation: a shifting mental mode in late life development

Changes in cognition, affect, and brain function combine to promote a shift in the nature of mentation in older adulthood, favoring exploitation of prior knowledge over exploratory search as the starting point for thought and action. Age-related exploitation biases result from the accumulation of prior knowledge, reduced cognitive control, and a shift toward affective goals. These are accompanied by changes in cortical networks, as well as attention and reward circuits. By incorporating these factors into a unified account, the exploration-to-exploitation shift offers an integrative model of cognitive, affective, and brain aging. Here, we review evidence for this model, identify determinants and consequences, and survey the challenges and opportunities posed by an exploitation-biased mental mode in later life.

Reward at encoding but not retrieval modulates memory for detailed events

Much of the evidence suggesting that rewards improve memory performance has focused on how explicit rewards facilitate encoding of simplistic stimuli. To expand beyond this focus, the current study tested how explicit rewards presented at encoding as well as retrieval facilitate memory for information contained within complex events. In a single experimental session, participants (N = 88) encoded videos depicting naturalistic events (e.g., getting dressed) and then completed a recognition test probing their memory for different detail types (i.e., event, perceptual, or contextual) from the video stimuli. We manipulated the explicit reward associated with each video, such that accurate memory responses for half the videos were associated with high monetary incentives and half were associated with low monetary incentives. This reward manipulation was presented at either encoding or retrieval during a recognition memory test. The reward manipulation only affected memory when presented at encoding and this effect did not depend on the type of detail probed. Drift Diffusion Modelling further revealed that presenting reward information at encoding engendered greater encoding fidelity-indexed by an increase in drift rate-but did not change response caution at the time of retrieval-indexed by response threshold. Together, our results suggest that presenting reward information when encoding but not retrieving complex events has a general facilitatory effect, likely via attentional processing, on the ability to later remember precise details from the event.

Older and younger adults' revision of health misconceptions

Although ample younger adult research has detailed effective strategies for revising misconceptions, research with older adults is less extensive. Older adults may be less able to correct errors in knowledge due to age-related changes in cognition, but it is also possible that older adults' revision of misconceptions has been limited by methodologies which do not provide adequate support for correction. In two experiments, we examined how older and younger adults revise health-related misconceptions when provided with cognitive support in the form of explicit detailed feedback and an immediate test. Older and younger adults in Experiment 1 answered true/false health statements, received feedback with a detailed explanation of the correct response, took an additional test on the same statements immediately following the initial test, and completed a final test 1-week later. Older and younger adults corrected a similar proportion of misconceptions immediately and maintained most of those revisions across a 1-week delay. In Experiment 2, older adults corrected the same proportion of misconceptions on the final test regardless of whether or not they received a test immediately following feedback. Overall, older adults revised health misconceptions as effectively as did younger adults but variables influencing correction (e.g., belief in feedback) may differ.

Building memories on prior knowledge: behavioral and fMRI evidence of impairment in early Alzheimer's disease

Impaired memory is a hallmark of prodromal Alzheimer's disease (AD). Prior knowledge associated with the memoranda improves memory in healthy individuals, but we ignore whether the same occurs in early AD. We used functional MRI to investigate whether prior knowledge enhances memory encoding in early AD, and whether the nature of this prior knowledge matters. Patients with early AD and Controls underwent a task-based fMRI experiment where they learned face-scene associations. Famous faces carried pre-experimental knowledge (PEK), while unknown faces with which participants were familiarized prior to learning carried experimental knowledge (EK). Surprisingly, PEK strongly enhanced subsequent memory in healthy controls, but importantly not in patients. Partly nonoverlapping brain networks supported PEK vs. EK associative encoding in healthy controls. No such networks were identified in patients. In addition, patients displayed impaired activation in a right sub hippocampal region where activity predicted successful associative memory formation for PEK stimuli. Despite the limited sample sizes of this study, these findings suggest that the role prior knowledge in new learning might have been so far overlooked and underestimated in AD patients. Prior knowledge may drive critical differences in the way healthy elderly and early AD patients learn novel associations.

Semantic knowledge attenuates age-related differences in event segmentation and episodic memory

While semantic and episodic memory may be distinct memory systems, their interdependence is substantial. For instance, decades of work have shown that semantic knowledge facilitates episodic memory. Here, we aim to clarify this interactive relationship by determining whether semantic knowledge facilitates the acquisition of new episodic memories, in part, by influencing an encoding mechanism, event segmentation. In the current study, we evaluated the extent to which semantic knowledge shapes how people segment ongoing activity and how such knowledge-related benefits in segmentation affect episodic memory performance. To investigate these effects, we combined data across three studies that had young and older adults segment and remember videos of everyday activities that were either familiar or unfamiliar to their age group. We found age-related differences in event-segmentation ability and memory performance, but only when older adults lacked semantic knowledge. Most importantly, when they had access to relevant semantic knowledge, older adults segmented and remembered information similar to young adults. Our findings indicate that older adults can use semantic knowledge to effectively encode and retrieve everyday information. These effects suggest that future interventions can leverage older adults' intact semantic knowledge to attenuate age-related deficits in event segmentation and episodic long-term memory.

Knowledge guides attention to goal-relevant information in older adults

How does viewers’ knowledge guide their attention while they watch everyday events, how does it affect their memory, and does it change with age? Older adults have diminished episodic memory for everyday events, but intact semantic knowledge. Indeed, research suggests that older adults may rely on their semantic memory to offset impairments in episodic memory, and when relevant knowledge is lacking, older adults’ memory can suffer. Yet, the mechanism by which prior knowledge guides attentional selection when watching dynamic activity is unclear. To address this, we studied the influence of knowledge on attention and memory for everyday events in young and older adults by tracking their eyes while they watched videos. The videos depicted activities that older adults perform more frequently than young adults (balancing a checkbook, planting flowers) or activities that young adults perform more frequently than older adults (installing a printer, setting up a video game). Participants completed free recall, recognition, and order memory tests after each video. We found age-related memory deficits when older adults had little knowledge of the activities, but memory did not differ between age groups when older adults had relevant knowledge and experience with the activities. Critically, results showed that knowledge influenced where viewers fixated when watching the videos. Older adults fixated less goal-relevant information compared to young adults when watching young adult activities, but they fixated goal-relevant information similarly to young adults, when watching more older adult activities. Finally, results showed that fixating goal-relevant information predicted free recall of the everyday activities for both age groups. Thus, older adults may use relevant knowledge to more effectively infer the goals of actors, which guides their attention to goal-relevant actions, thus improving their episodic memory for everyday activities.

The predictors of general knowledge: Data from a Spanish megastudy

Studies on sociodemographic data and crystallized intelligence have often struggled to recruit enough participants to achieve sufficient validity. However, the advent of the internet now allows this problem to be solved through the creation of megastudies. Yet, this methodology so far has only been used in studies on vocabulary size, while general knowledge, another key component of crystallized intelligence, remains unexamined. In the present study, regression models were used to examine the impact of sociodemographic variables—gender, age, years of study and socioeconomic status—on general knowledge scores. The sample comprised 48,234 participants, each of whom answered 60 general knowledge questions, their data being fully available online. Men were found to score higher than women in general knowledge. Years of study and socioeconomic status acted as strong and weak positive predictors, respectively. Age acted as a strong positive predictor until the age of 50, where it became progressively detrimental. These results are discussed relative to other studies on crystallized intelligence, highlighting the need to study each of its components individually.

The ironic effect of older adults' increased task motivation: Implications for neurocognitive aging

Recent work suggests that most older adults who volunteer to take part in cognitive experiments are more motivated to do well than are undergraduate students. This empirical evidence is echoed by the impressions of cognitive aging researchers. We surveyed a large group (N = 88) of researchers asking about their perceptions of younger and older adults' motivation to take part in lab-based research. Not only were older adults seen as more motivated than younger adults, but researchers thought that the two groups participate for different reasons: younger adults to obtain course credit or monetary compensation, older adults to get a sense of their cognitive health, to further science, and out of curiosity. However, older adults' greater motivation to do well on cognitive tasks may leave them vulnerable to stereotype threat, the phenomenon by which individuals underperform when they are put in a position to either confirm or deny a negative stereotype about their group. In this opinion piece, we argue that most cognitive experiments, not just those designed to measure stereotype threat, likely induce some form of performance-related anxiety in older adults. This anxiety likely leads to greater task-related interference, or thoughts about how one is doing on the task, resulting in poorer performance. We discuss some of the potential implications for our understanding of neurocognitive aging.

Using the phenomenology of memory for recent events to bridge the gap between episodic and semantic memory

Public events such as celebrity news, tragedies, and political events are widely experienced. Initially at least, memories of these events are "episodic" in nature; however, these events are also stored in associative networks similar to the semantic organization of knowledge (N. R. Brown, 1990, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 119[3], 297-314). Thus, these memories provide a novel way of examining how episodically experienced events might become semanticized and integrated into the knowledge base. Younger and older adults rated their subjective memory strength for and answered questions about details of events occurring over the previous 12 years. Participants also rated their phenomenological experience using a modified remember/know paradigm, in which no instructions about usage of the terms were provided. Interestingly, remembered and known items were equal in terms of subjective strength. Know responses were highly accurate, and more so than remember responses. Older and younger adults performed similarly. Participants' own definitions of remember, know, and just familiar revealed that knowing is associated with retrieval from semantic memory, whereas remembering and just familiarity are more associated with event/episodic memory. These results suggest that memory for public events shares phenomenological features with both episodic/event memory and semantic memory. Public events thus allow researchers to examine the complex ways in which storage of novel information can be jointly maintained in both episodic and semantic memory.

Brain-environment alignment during movie watching predicts fluid intelligence and affective function in adulthood

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Functional brain connectivity (FC) patterns vary with changes in the environment.

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Adult FC variability is linked to age-specific network communication profiles.

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Across adulthood, the younger network interaction profile predicts higher fluid IQ.

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Yoked FC-concrete environmental changes predict poorer fluid IQ and anxiety.

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Brain areas linked to episodic memory underpin FC changes at multiple timescales.

BOLD fMRI studies have provided compelling evidence that the human brain demonstrates substantial moment-to-moment fluctuations in both activity and functional connectivity (FC) patterns. While the role of brain signal variability in fostering cognitive adaptation to ongoing environmental demands is well-documented, the relevance of moment-to-moment changes in FC patterns is still debated. Here, we adopt a graph theoretical approach in order to shed light on the cognitive-affective implications of FC variability and associated profiles of functional network communication in adulthood. Our goal is to identify brain communication pathways underlying FC reconfiguration at multiple timescales, thereby improving understanding of how faster perceptually bound versus slower conceptual processes shape neural tuning to the dynamics of the external world and, thus, indirectly, mold affective and cognitive responding to the environment. To this end, we used neuroimaging and behavioural data collected during movie watching by the Cambridge Center for Ageing and Neuroscience (N = 642, 326 women) and the Human Connectome Project (N = 176, 106 women). FC variability evoked by changes to both the concrete perceptual and the more abstract conceptual representation of an ongoing situation increased from young to older adulthood. However, coupling between variability in FC patterns and concrete environmental features was stronger at younger ages. FC variability (both moment-to-moment/concrete featural and abstract conceptual boundary-evoked) was associated with age-distinct profiles of network communication, specifically, greater functional integration of the default mode network in older adulthood, but greater informational flow across neural networks implicated in environmentally driven attention and control (cingulo-opercular, salience, ventral attention) in younger adulthood. Whole-brain communication pathways anchored in default mode regions relevant to episodic and semantic context creation (i.e., angular and middle temporal gyri) supported FC reconfiguration in response to changes in the conceptual representation of an ongoing situation (i.e., narrative event boundaries), as well as stronger coupling between moment-to-moment fluctuations in FC and concrete environmental features. Fluid intelligence/abstract reasoning was directly linked to levels of brain-environment alignment, but only indirectly associated with levels of FC variability. Specifically, stronger coupling between moment-to-moment FC variability and concrete environmental features predicted poorer fluid intelligence and greater affectively driven environmental vigilance. Complementarily, across the adult lifespan, higher fluid (but not crystallised) intelligence was related to stronger expression of the network communication profile underlying momentary and event boundary-based FC variability during youth. Our results indicate that the adaptiveness of dynamic FC reconfiguration during naturalistic information processing changes across the lifespan due to the associated network communication profiles. Moreover, our findings on brain-environment alignment complement the existing literature on the beneficial consequences of modulating brain signal variability in response to environmental complexity. Specifically, they imply that coupling between moment-to-moment FC variability and concrete environmental features may index a bias towards perceptually-bound, rather than conceptual processing, which hinders affective functioning and strategic cognitive engagement with the external environment.

The role of metacognition and schematic support in younger and older adults' episodic memory

Older adults experience deficits in associative memory. However, age-related differences are reduced when information is consistent with prior knowledge (i.e., schematic support), suggesting that episodic and semantic memory are interrelated. It is unclear what role metacognitive processes play in schematic support. Prior knowledge may reduce encoding demands, but older adults may allocate cognitive resources to schema-consistent information because it is more meaningful. We examined metacognitive awareness of and control over associative information that was consistent or inconsistent with prior knowledge. In Experiment 1, participants self-paced their study of grocery items paired with either market prices or unusually high prices and were tested on the exact price of each item over four study-test lists with new items on each list. In Experiment 2, participants studied items for a fixed time but made judgments of learning (JOLs) at encoding. Older adults better remembered the prices of market-value items than overpriced items. In Experiment 1, younger and older adults studied overpriced items longer than market-priced items, consistent with a discrepancy reduction model of self-regulated learning, but study time did not relate to later recall accuracy, suggesting a labor-in-vain effect. In Experiment 2, participants gave higher JOLs to market-priced items than overpriced items and were generally metacognitively aware of the benefits of schematic support. Together, these results suggest that the benefits of schematic support may not be dependent on or influenced by metacognitive control processes, supporting the hypothesis that episodic memory may be less distinct from semantic memory in younger and older adults.

The Functional Foundations of Episodic Memory Remain Stable Throughout the Lifespan

It has been suggested that specific forms of cognition in older age rely largely on late-life specific mechanisms. Here instead, we tested using task-fMRI (n = 540, age 6–82 years) whether the functional foundations of successful episodic memory encoding adhere to a principle of lifespan continuity, shaped by developmental, structural, and evolutionary influences. We clustered regions of the cerebral cortex according to the shape of the lifespan trajectory of memory activity in each region so that regions showing the same pattern were clustered together. The results revealed that lifespan trajectories of memory encoding function showed a continuity through life but no evidence of age-specific mechanisms such as compensatory patterns. Encoding activity was related to general cognitive abilities and variations of grey matter as captured by a multi-modal independent component analysis, variables reflecting core aspects of cognitive and structural change throughout the lifespan. Furthermore, memory encoding activity aligned to fundamental aspects of brain organization, such as large-scale connectivity and evolutionary cortical expansion gradients. Altogether, we provide novel support for a perspective on memory aging in which maintenance and decay of episodic memory in older age needs to be understood from a comprehensive life-long perspective rather than as a late-life phenomenon only.

Features of daily social interactions that discriminate between older adults with and without mild cognitive impairment

OBJECTIVES

Detecting subtle behavioral changes in everyday life as early signs of cognitive decline and impairment is important for effective early intervention against Alzheimer's disease. This study examined whether features of daily social interactions captured by ecological momentary assessments could serve as more sensitive behavioral markers to distinguish older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) from those without MCI, as compared to conventional global measures of social relationships.

METHOD

Participants were 311 community dwelling older adults (aged 70 to 90 years) who reported their social interactions and socializing activities five times daily for 14 consecutive days using smartphones.

RESULTS

Compared to those with normal cognitive function, older adults classified as MCI reported less frequent total and positive social interactions and less frequent in-person socializing activities on a daily basis. Older adults with and without MCI, however, did not show differences in most features of social relationships assessed by conventional global measures.

DISCUSSION

These results suggest that certain features of daily social interactions (quality and quantity) could serve as sensitive and ecologically valid behavioral markers to facilitate the detection of MCI.

A database of general knowledge question performance in older adults

General knowledge questions are used across a variety of research and clinical settings to measure cognitive processes such as metacognition, knowledge acquisition, retrieval processes, and intelligence. Existing norms only report performance in younger adults, rendering them of limited utility for cognitive aging research because of well-documented differences in semantic memory and knowledge as a function of age. Specifically, older adults typically outperform younger adults in tasks assessing retrieval of information from the knowledge base. Here we present older adult performance on 421 general knowledge questions across a range of difficulty levels. Cued recall data, including data on the phenomenology of retrieval failures, and multiple-choice data are available. These norms will allow researchers to identify questions that are not likely to be known by older adult participants to examine learning or acquisition processes, or to select questions within a range of marginal accessibility, for example. Comparisons with young adult data from prior databases confirms previous findings of greater knowledge in older adults and indicates there is preservation of knowledge from early adulthood into older adulthood.

Aging and binding in short-term memory: processes involved in conjunctive and relational binding

In visual short-term binding memory tasks, some studies suggested that aging disrupts relational binding more than conjunctive binding, whereas others report equivalent age-related differences in both types of binding. Yet, demands in controlled resources are potentially the greatest for relational short-term binding. In order to test the hypothesis that aging would affect preferentially tasks demanding in controlled processes, we assessed the contribution of controlled and automatic memory processes to relational and conjunctive short-term binding. Groups of young and older adults studied shape-colour (Exp.1 and 3) or object-colour (Exp.2) pairs in a relational condition in which items were linked to colour patches and a conjunctive condition where colour was integrated into the items. Memory for bindings was tested with a reconstruction task (Exp. 1 and 2) or with a recognition memory task (Exp. 3) under inclusion and exclusion instructions (Process Dissociation Procedure). The three experiments showed that the retrieval of both relational and conjunctive bindings relied primarily on controlled memory processes, the use of which was diminished in older participants. This study brings additional evidence that age-related differences in top-down control processes explain at least partly decreased short-term binding capacities.