The Effect of Aging on the Dynamics of Reactive and Proactive Cognitive Control of Response Interference

Attentional Control in Subjective Cognitive Decline

BACKGROUND

Attention is an essential cognitive ability that is necessary in other cognitive processes. Only few studies have focused on decline in specific functions of attention in older adults with cognitive decline. No research explores the difference in the proactive and reactive mode of control between the healthy control (HC) and older adults with subjective cognitive decline (SCD).

OBJECTIVE

The current work investigated whether there was any decline in alerting, orienting, and executive control in SCD. Particularly, the present study further explored the impairment of the proactive and reactive control in SCD.

METHODS

We recruited 25 HC and 26 SCD. All participants first finished a set of neuropsychological assessments. They then completed an Attention Network Test for measuring the alerting, orienting, and executive control, the List-wide and the Item-specific Proportion Congruency Effect task for measuring the proactive and reactive mode of control, respectively.

RESULTS

No difference was found in alerting, orienting, and executive control measured by the ANT between SCD and HC. The results also indicated no difference in the reactive control between SCD and HC. However, older adults with SCD performed worse in the proactive control as compared to HC.

CONCLUSION

Older adults with SCD showed an impairment in the proactive control. The current findings help us better understand objective decline in cognitive domains other than memory and shed light on early assessment and prevention of AD.

Older bilinguals reverse language dominance less than younger bilinguals: Evidence for the inhibitory deficit hypothesis

Inhibitory control is thought to play a key role in how bilinguals switch languages and may decline in aging. We tested these hypotheses by examining age group differences in the reversed language dominance effect-a signature of inhibition of the dominant language that leads bilinguals to name pictures more slowly in the dominant than the nondominant language in mixed-language testing blocks. Twenty-five older and 48 younger Spanish-English bilinguals completed a cued language-switching task. To test if inhibition is applied at the whole-language or lexical level, we first presented one set of pictures repeatedly, then introduced a second list halfway through the experiment. Younger bilinguals exhibited significantly greater reversed language dominance effects than older bilinguals (who exhibited nonsignificant language dominance effects). In younger bilinguals, dominance reversal transferred to, and was even larger in, the second list (compared to the first). The latter result may suggest that inhibition is partially offset by repetition in ways that are not yet fully understood. More generally, these results support the hypotheses that aging impairs inhibitory control of the dominant language, which young bilinguals rely on to switch languages. Additionally, inhibition is applied primarily at the whole-language level, and speculatively, this form of language control may be analogous to nonlinguistic proactive control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Can a Theater Acting Intervention Enhance Inhibitory Control in Older Adults? A Brain-Behavior Investigation

Purpose: Studies of reactive and proactive modes of inhibitory control tend to show age-related declines and are accompanied by abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex. We explored which mode of inhibitory control would be more amenable to change and accrue greater benefits following engagement in a 4-week theater acting intervention in older adults. These gains were evaluated by performance on the AX-CPT task. We hypothesized that an increase in proactive control would relate to an increase in AY errors and a decrease in BX errors. In contrast, an increase in reactive control would be associated with a decrease in AY errors, no change in AY reaction time, and an increase in BX response time. Further, we posited that an increase in behavioral proactive control would accompany greater cue versus probe activity for previously identified regions in the prefrontal cortex. In contrast, an increase in behavioral reactive control would be accompanied by greater probe activation in these identified brain areas. Materials and Methods: The participants were 179 community-dwelling adults aged 60-89 years who were on average, college-educated. Participants were pseudo-randomly assigned to either an active-experiencing acting intervention condition (n = 93) or the active control condition (n = 86); participant assignment was subject to time of enrollment. Participants in both groups were trained by theater-actor researchers with expertise in acting interventions. In contrast to the active control participants who attended a course on theater acting, the acting-intervention group was required to consistently deploy proactive and reactive control mechanisms. Both groups met two times/week for 75-min for 4 weeks. Participant brain-behavioral performance on the AX-CPT task was evaluated prior to and after this four-week period. Results: No intervention effects were found in favor of proactive control. Behavioral evidence in favor of reactive control was weak. Brain-related benefits to reactive control was illustrated by greater probe-activation in Brodmann areas 6 and 8, relative to controls and pre-intervention. Conclusion: We found some evidence for improvements in reactive control via brain measures, attributed to engagement in the acting intervention.

Imaging the effects of age on proactive control in healthy adults

Previous research has reported reduced efficiency in reactive inhibition, along with reduced brain activations, in older adults. The current study investigated age-related behavioral and neural changes in proactive inhibition, and whether age may influence the relationship between proactive and reactive inhibition. One-hundred-and-forty-nine adults (18 to 72 years) underwent fMRI while performing a stop signal task (SST). Proactive inhibition was defined by the sequential effect, the correlation between the estimated probability of stop signal - p(Stop) - and go trial reaction time (goRT). P(Stop) was estimated trial by trial with a Bayesian belief model; reactive inhibition was defined by the stop signal reaction time (SSRT). Behaviorally the magnitude of sequential effect was not correlated with age, replicating earlier reports of spared proactive control in older adults. Age was associated with greater activations to p(Stop) in the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), paracentral lobule, superior parietal lobule, and cerebellum, and activations to goRT in the inferior occipital gyrus (IOG). Granger Causality analysis demonstrated that the PFC Granger caused IOG, with the PFC-IOG connectivity significantly correlated with p(Stop) in older but not younger adults. These findings suggest that the PFC and IOG activations and PFC-IOG connectivity may compensate for proactive control during aging. In contrast, while the activations of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and caudate head to p(Stop) were negatively correlated with SSRT, relating proactive to reactive control, these activities did not vary with age. These findings highlighted distinct neural processes underlying proactive inhibition and limited neural plasticity to support cognitive control in the aging brain.

A cross-sectional study on interference control: age affects reactive control but not proactive control

Background

Working memory updating (WMU), a controlled process to continuously adapt to the changing task demand and environment, is crucial for cognitive executive function. Although previous studies have shown that the elderly were more susceptible to cognitive interference than the youngsters, the picture of age-related deterioration of WMU is incomplete due to lack of study on people at their middle ages. Thus, the present study investigated the impact of age on the WMU among adults by a cross-sectional design to verify whether inefficiency interference control accounts for the aging of WMU.

Methods

In total, 112 healthy adults were recruited for this study; 28 old adults (21 female) ranging from 60 to 78 years of age; 28 middle-age adults (25 female) ranging from 45 to 59 years of age; 28 adults (11 female) ranging from 26 to 44 years of age; and 28 young adults (26 female) ranging from 18 to 25 years of age. Each participant completed a 1-back task. The inverse efficiency score was calculated in various sequences of three trials in a row to quantify the performance of WMU for adults of various ages.

Results

Inverse efficiency score of both young groups (young adult and adult) were significantly shorter than the old group in both Repeat-Alternate (RA, including □□○ and ○○□) and Alternate-Alternate (AA, including ○□○ and □○□) sequential patterns and they were additionally better than the middle-age group in AA sequential pattern.

Conclusion

With the increase of difficulty in the task, the difference in reactive interference control between young and middle age was gradually revealed, while the difference between young and old remained to apparent. The degradation of WMU aging may begin from middle-age and presents selective impairment in that only reactive interference control, but not proactive interference control, shows pronounced age-related decline. The preliminary results can inform future studies to further explore the whole lifespan trajectories of cognitive functions.

Attentional Reorientation and Inhibition Adjustment in a Verbal Stroop Task: A Lifespan Approach to Interference and Sequential Congruency Effect

Several parameters influence the interference effect elicited in a Stroop task, especially contextual information. Contextual effects in the Stroop paradigms are known as the Gratton or Sequential congruency effect (SCE). This research aims at isolating two processes contributing to the SCE in a Stroop paradigm, namely attentional reorientation from the color to the word and vice-versa, as well as inhibition (engagement/disengagement from one trial to the next one). To this end, in Study 1 subprocesses of the SCE were isolated. Specifically, attentional reorientation and inhibition were segregated by submitting young adults to a discrete verbal Stroop task including neutral trials. In Study 2, the same procedure was applied to 124 participants aged from 10 to 80 years old to analyze how interference, SCE, and the aforementioned decomposition of attention and inhibition change across the lifespan. In both studies, the Gratton effect was only partially replicated, while both attentional reorientation and inhibition effects were observed, supporting the idea that these two processes contribute to SCE on top of conflict monitoring and of other processes highlighted in different theories (contingency learning, feature integration, and repetition expectancy). Finally, the classical age-related evolution was replicated in Study 2 on raw interference scores, but no age effect was observed when processing speed was taken into account, nor on the isolated attentional reorientation and inhibition processes, which is in line with the hypothesis of stability of the inhibition processes over age.