Aging and situation model processing

Propositional density: cognitive impairment and aging

It is important to understand the relationship between cognitive abilities and language processing. Here, we explore a burgeoning area of research that harnesses semantic indices to predict cognitive impairment and track cognitive decline. One such index, propositional density, quantifies the information conveyed per language segment. Despite some variation stemming from methodological, sampling, and measurement differences, we suggest that propositional density has diagnostic and assessment value. This paper surveys existing studies that have used propositional density in the context of cognitive aging and impairment and offers some insights into the use of this index to highlight differences in cognition. We also suggest further explorations of basic research involving this concept, and some applications for assessing cognitive health.

Working memory limitations constrain visual episodic long-term memory at both specific and gist levels of representation

Limitations in one's capacity to encode information in working memory (WM) constrain later access to that information in long-term memory (LTM). The present study examined whether these WM constraints on episodic LTM are limited to specific representations of past episodes or also extend to gist representations. Across three experiments, young adult participants (n = 40 per experiment) studied objects in set sizes of two or six items, either sequentially (Experiments 1a and 1b) or simultaneously (Experiment 2). They then completed old/new recognition tests immediately after each sequence (WM tests). After a long study phase, participants completed LTM conjoint recognition tests, featuring old but untested items from the WM phase, lures that were similar to studied items at gist but not specific levels of representation, and new items unrelated to studied items at both specific and gist levels of representation. Results showed that LTM estimates of specific and gist memory representations from a multinomial-processing-tree model were reduced for items encoded under supra-capacity set sizes (six items) relative to within-capacity set sizes (two items). These results suggest that WM encoding capacity limitations constrain episodic LTM at both specific and gist levels of representation, at least for visual objects. The ability to retrieve from LTM each type of representation for a visual item is contingent on the degree to which the item could be encoded in WM.

The Effects of Sustained Literacy Engagement on Cognition and Sentence Processing Among Older Adults

Considerable evidence suggests that language processing depends on memory processes, which are vulnerable to declines with aging. Yet little is known about the effects of language processing in the form of sustained literacy engagement on memory and other aspects of cognition. In the current study, adults (60-79 years of age) were randomly assigned to an 8-week program of leisure reading (n = 38) or to an active puzzle control (n = 38). Relative to the control, the experimental group showed differential improvement in verbal working memory and episodic memory. The experimental group also showed evidence of enhanced conceptual integration in sentence processing. These effects did not vary as a function of personality characteristics (e.g., openness) hypothesized to be compatible with literacy engagement. These findings support the idea that the exercise of cognitive capacities in the context of everyday life may offset age-related impairment in areas of cognition engaged by the activity, regardless of dispositional fit.

Do faces speak volumes? Social expectations in speech comprehension and evaluation across three age groups

An unresolved issue in social perception concerns the effect of perceived ethnicity on speech processing. Bias-based accounts assume conscious misunderstanding of native speech in the case of a speaker classification as nonnative, resulting in negative ratings and poorer comprehension. In contrast, exemplar models of socially indexed speech perception suggest that such negative effects arise only when a contextual cue to the social identity is misleading, i.e. when ethnicity and speech clash with listeners' expectations. To address these accounts, and to assess ethnicity effects across different age groups, three non-university populations (N = 172) were primed with photographs of Asian and white European women and asked to repeat and rate utterances spoken in three accents (Korean-accented German, a regional German accent, standard German), all embedded in background noise. In line with exemplar models, repetition accuracy increased when the expected and perceived speech matched, but the effect was limited to the foreign accent, and-at the group level-to teens and older adults. In contrast, Asian speakers received the most negative accent ratings across all accents, consistent with a bias-based view, but group distinctions again came into play here, with the effect most pronounced in older adults, and limited to standard German for teens. Importantly, the effects varied across ages, with younger adults showing no effects of ethnicity in either task. The findings suggest that theoretical contradictions are a consequence of methodological choices, which reflect distinct aspects of social information processing.

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.

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.

Can discourse processing performance serve as an early marker of Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment? A systematic review of text comprehension

A number of linguistic and cognitive deficits have been reported during the course of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and its preceding stage of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), with some deficits appearing years before onset of clinical symptoms. It continues to be a critical task to identify tools that may serve as an early marker of pathology that are also reliably able to distinguish AD from normal ageing. Given the limited success of classic psychometric cognitive testing, a novel approach in assessment is warranted. A potentially sensitive assessment paradigm is discourse processing. The aim of this review was to synthesize original research studies investigating comprehension of discourse in AD and MCI, and to evaluate the potential of this paradigm as a promising avenue for further research. A literature search targeting studies with AD or MCI groups over 60 years of age was conducted in PubMed, Web of Science, and PsycINFO databases. Eight articles with good quality were included in the review. Six measures of discourse comprehension—naming latency, summary, lesson, main idea, proportion of inferential clauses, true/false questions—were identified. All eight studies reported significant deficits in discourse comprehension in AD and MCI groups on five of the six measures, when compared to cognitively healthy older adults. Mixed results were observed for associations with commonly used cognitive measures. Given the consistent findings for discourse comprehension measures across all studies, we strongly recommend further research on its early predictive potential, and discuss different avenues for research.

The psycholinguistic and affective processing of framed health messages among younger and older adults

How health-related messages are framed can impact their effectiveness in promoting behaviors, and messages framed in terms of gains have been shown to be more effective among older adults. Recent findings have suggested that the affective response to framed messages can contribute to these effects. However, the impact of demands associated with psycholinguistic processing for different frames is not well understood. In this study, exercise-related messages were gain or loss framed and with a focus on either desirable or undesirable outcomes. Participants read these messages while their eye movements were monitored and then provided affective ratings. Older adults reacted less negatively than younger adults to loss-framed messages and messages focusing on undesirable outcomes. Eye-movement measures indicated both younger and older adults had difficulty processing the most complex messages (loss-framed messages focused on avoiding desirable outcomes). When gain-framed messages were easily processed, they engendered more positive affect, which in turn, was related to better recall. These results suggest that affective and cognitive mechanisms are interdependent in comprehension of framed messages for younger and older adults. An implication for translation to effective health communication is that simpler message framing engenders a positive reaction, which in turn supports memory for that information, regardless of age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Do you feel like me or not? This is the question: manipulation of emotional imagery modulates affective priming

Mood congruity and affective priming have been used to study the effects of affective phenomena on perception. Manipulation of mood is appropriate for investigations of long-term effects while affective priming is limited to short intervals (approximately 300 ms) between a prime and target. However, studying the influence of real-world rapidly changing emotional episodes on perception may fall between the cracks of these methods. This may be caused, inter alia, because emotional episodes are distinguished from mood experiences on one hand, but often last for longer than roughly 300 ms on the other. Thus, it is unclear what experimental approach should be taken to investigate congruency effects triggered by emotional episodes. The present study used a new variation of the evaluation decision task (EDT) combined with a script-driven imagery procedure to investigate a possible congruency relationship between the evaluator's emotional experience at a given time and observable emotional markers of others. We used 180 9-word script-driven imageries as varying valence primes (negative, positive, neutral) and asked participants to imagine themselves in the situation described in the scripts. At the last stage of a trial, all participants were asked to evaluate the mood-positive or negative-of a target face of a child in a photograph. We manipulated the reading interval (4000 ms and 1350 ms) and the subsequent blank interval (300 ms, 5000 ms, and unlimited) until target onset. Prime and target valence were congruent or incongruent. Significant congruency effects were found for both short and long reading intervals and blank intervals. However, in longer blank intervals only the interference effect reached significance. Furthermore, the interference effect was found to be significant mainly in trials beginning with a negative script.

Aging alters neural activity at event boundaries in the hippocampus and Posterior Medial network

Recent research has highlighted a role for the hippocampus and a Posterior Medial cortical network in signaling event boundaries. However, little is known about whether or how these neural processes change over the course of healthy aging. Here, 546 cognitively normal participants 18-88 years old viewed a short movie while brain activity was measured using fMRI. The hippocampus and regions of the Posterior Medial network show increased activity at event boundaries, but these boundary-evoked responses decrease with age. Boundary-evoked activity in the posterior hippocampus predicts performance on a separate test of memory for stories, suggesting that hippocampal activity during event segmentation may be a broad indicator of individual differences in episodic memory ability. In contrast, boundary-evoked responses in the medial prefrontal cortex and middle temporal gyrus increase across the age range. These findings suggest that aging may alter neural processes for segmenting and remembering continuous real-world experiences.

Differential effects of knowledge and aging on the encoding and retrieval of everyday activities

We deconstruct continuous streams of action into smaller, meaningful events. Research has shown that the ability to segment continuous activity into such events and remember their contents declines with age; however, knowledge improves with age. We investigated how young and older adults use knowledge to more efficiently encode and later remember information from everyday events by having participants view a series of self-paced slideshows depicting everyday activities. For some activities, older adults produce more normative scripts than do young adults (older adult activities) and for other activities, young adults produce more normative scripts than do older adults (young adult activities). Overall, participants viewed event boundaries longer than within events (i.e., the event boundary advantage) replicating prior research (e.g., Hard, Recchia, & Tversky, 2011). Importantly, older adults demonstrated the boundary advantage for the older adult activities but not the young adult activities, and they also had better recognition memory for the older adult activities than the young adult activities. We also found that the magnitude of a participant's boundary advantage was associated with better memory, but only for the less knowledgeable activities. Results indicate that older adults use their intact knowledge to better encode and remember everyday activities, but that knowledge and event segmentation may have independent influences on event memory.

Event Perception and Memory

Events make up much of our lived experience, and the perceptual mechanisms that represent events in experience have pervasive effects on action control, language use, and remembering. Event representations in both perception and memory have rich internal structure and connections one to another, and both are heavily informed by knowledge accumulated from previous experiences. Event perception and memory have been identified with specific computational and neural mechanisms, which show protracted development in childhood and are affected by language use, expertise, and brain disorders and injuries. Current theoretical approaches focus on the mechanisms by which events are segmented from ongoing experience, and emphasize the common coding of events for perception, action, and memory. Abetted by developments in eye-tracking, neuroimaging, and computer science, research on event perception and memory is moving from small-scale laboratory analogs to the complexity of events in the wild.

Situation model updating in young and older adults

Over the past decade or so, developments in language comprehension research in the domain of cognitive aging have converged on support for resilience in older adults with regard to situation model updating when reading texts. Several studies have shown that even though age-related declines in language comprehension appear at the level of the surface form and text base of the text, these age differences do not apply to the creation and updating of situation models. In fact, older adults seem more sensitive to certain manipulations of situation model updating. This article presents a review of theories on situation model updating as well how they match with research on situation model updating in younger and older adults. Factors that may be responsible for the resilience of language comprehension in older age will be discussed as well as avenues for future research.

The SLS-Berlin: Validation of a German Computer-Based Screening Test to Measure Reading Proficiency in Early and Late Adulthood

Reading proficiency, i.e., successfully integrating early word-based information and utilizing this information in later processes of sentence and text comprehension, and its assessment is subject to extensive research. However, screening tests for German adults across the life span are basically non-existent. Therefore, the present article introduces a standardized computerized sentence-based screening measure for German adult readers to assess reading proficiency including norm data from 2,148 participants covering an age range from 16 to 88 years. The test was developed in accordance with the children's version of the Salzburger LeseScreening (SLS, Wimmer and Mayringer, 2014). The SLS-Berlin has a high reliability and can easily be implemented in any research setting using German language. We present a detailed description of the test and report the distribution of SLS-Berlin scores for the norm sample as well as for two subsamples of younger (below 60 years) and older adults (60 and older). For all three samples, we conducted regression analyses to investigate the relationship between sentence characteristics and SLS-Berlin scores. In a second validation study, SLS-Berlin scores were compared with two (pseudo)word reading tests, a test measuring attention and processing speed and eye-movements recorded during expository text reading. Our results confirm the SLS-Berlin's sensitivity to capture early word decoding and later text related comprehension processes. The test distinguished very well between skilled and less skilled readers and also within less skilled readers and is therefore a powerful and efficient screening test for German adults to assess interindividual levels of reading proficiency.

The Role of Task Understanding on Younger and Older Adults' Performance

Objectives

Age-related performance decrements have been linked to inferior strategic choices. Strategy selection models argue that accurate task representations are necessary for choosing appropriate strategies. But no studies to date have compared task representations in younger and older adults. Metacognition research suggests age-related deficits in updating and utilizing strategy knowledge, but other research suggests age-related sparing when information can be consolidated into a coherent mental model.

Method

Study 1 validated the use of concept mapping as a tool for measuring task representation accuracy. Study 2 measured task representations before and after a complex strategic task to test for age-related decrements in task representation formation and updating.

Results

Task representation accuracy and task performance were equivalent across age groups. Better task representations were related to better performance. However, task representation scores remained fairly stable over the task with minimal evidence of updating.

Discussion

Our findings mirror those in the mental model literature suggesting age-related sparing of strategy use when information can be integrated into a coherent mental model. Future research should manipulate the presence of a unifying context to better evaluate this hypothesis.

Age-related differences in conversational discourse abilities A comparative study

Conversational discourse (CD) is among the most complex tasks in everyday life and relies on multiple cognitive domains (communicative and executive abilities). Alterations in discourse comprehension and production are often present in pathological aging. However, there is still a need to identify changes in healthy aging.

OBJECTIVE

This study aimed to compare young and older adults for the frequency of impaired communicative behaviors on a CD task. Performance was scored according to the Complementary Procedure of Conversational Discourse Analysis (CPCDA), developed based on the CD task from the Montreal Communication Evaluation Battery.

METHODS

A total of 95 participants (54 young-adults and 41 older adults) were evaluated. The frequency of communicative behaviors was compared between groups using MANCOVA and Chi-square tests.

RESULTS

Young adults showed fewer impairments in expression, pragmatics, cohesion, coherence, comprehension and emotional prosody. Older adults showed higher levels of verbal initiative and had fewer word finding difficulties. Communicative behaviors associated with planning and self-monitoring (e.g. repetition of information and syllabic false starts) appear to be common in the speech of healthy individuals in general.

CONCLUSION

Studies which evaluate both discursive and cognitive skills are required to identify age-related changes. This would allow for the development of screening tools for CD assessment and preventive programs.

Adults with Poor Reading Skills, Older Adults, and College Students: the Meanings They Understand During Reading Using a Diffusion Model Analysis

When a word is read in a text, the aspects of its meanings that are encoded should be those relevant to the text and not those that are irrelevant. We tested whether older adults, college students, and adults with poor literacy skills accomplish contextually relevant encoding. Participants read short stories, which were followed by true/false test sentences. Among these were sentences that matched the relevant meaning of a word in a story and sentences that matched a different meaning. We measured the speed and accuracy of responses to the test sentences and used a decision model to separate the information that a reader encodes from the reader's speed/accuracy tradeoff settings. We found that all three groups encoded meanings as contextually relevant. The findings illustrate how a decision-making model combined with tests of particular comprehension processes can lead to further understanding of reading skills.

Decision-Making Based on Social Conventional Rules by Elderly People

Information used by older adults engaging in a social decision making task of judging a protagonist as a good or a bad person was investigated. Older (n = 100, 50 women, mean age = 63.6 years) and younger (n = 100, 50 women, mean age = 25.7 years) adults participated in a web-based survey. In Experiment 1, we assessed participants’ rapid decision-making processes when making good or bad judgments after reading consecutive sentences without reviewing previously read sentences. The percentages of good judgments were analyzed. In Experiment 2, two protagonists engaging in a deliberate decision-making process were presented, and participants were asked to judge better and worse protagonists. The percentages of behavior-based judgments were analyzed. Results of Experiment 1 indicated that older adults judged protagonists as “good” more often than younger adults. Especially, older adults judged protagonists with good behavior as being “good.” In Experiment 2, older adults made behavior-based judgments more than younger people. Additionally, older and younger adults used information on personalities of protagonists for making judgments in situations with bad outcomes, or incongruent. Moreover, multiple regression analysis suggested that people with more general trust engaged more, whereas people with more caution engaged less in making behavior-based judgments.

Narrative Discourse in Young and Older Adults: Behavioral and NIRS Analyses

Discourse comprehension is at the core of communication capabilities, making it an important component of elderly populations' quality of life. The aim of this study is to evaluate changes in discourse comprehension and the underlying brain activity. Thirty-six participants read short stories and answered related probes in three conditions: micropropositions, macropropositions and situation models. Using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), the variation in oxyhemoglobin (HbO₂) and deoxyhemoglobin (HbR) concentrations was assessed throughout the task. The results revealed that the older adults performed with equivalent accuracy to the young ones at the macroproposition level of discourse comprehension, but were less accurate at the microproposition and situation model levels. Similar to what is described in the compensation-related utilization of neural circuits hypothesis (CRUNCH) model, older participants tended to have greater activation in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex while reading in all conditions. Although it did not enable them to perform similarly to younger participants in all conditions, this over-activation could be interpreted as a compensation mechanism.

The Effects of Home-Based Cognitive Training on Verbal Working Memory and Language Comprehension in Older Adulthood

Effective language understanding is crucial to maintaining cognitive abilities and learning new information through adulthood. However, age-related declines in working memory (WM) have a robust negative influence on multiple aspects of language comprehension and use, potentially limiting communicative competence. In the current study (N = 41), we examined the effects of a novel home-based computerized cognitive training program targeting verbal WM on changes in verbal WM and language comprehension in healthy older adults relative to an active component-control group. Participants in the WM training group showed non-linear improvements in performance on trained verbal WM tasks. Relative to the active control group, WM training participants also showed improvements on untrained verbal WM tasks and selective improvements across untrained dimensions of language, including sentence memory, verbal fluency, and comprehension of syntactically ambiguous sentences. Though the current study is preliminary in nature, it does provide initial promising evidence that WM training may influence components of language comprehension in adulthood and suggests that home-based training of WM may be a viable option for probing the scope and limits of cognitive plasticity in older adults.

The Potential for Literacy to Shape Lifelong Cognitive Health

In light of population aging, an understanding of factors that promote lifelong cognitive resilience is urgent. There is considerable evidence that education early in the life span, which promotes the development of literacy skills, leads to cognitive health and longevity, but the ways in which activity engagement in later adulthood affects long-term cognitive health is not well understood. The literature on cognitive training focusing on ability and skill training has not only demonstrated the existence of plasticity into late life but also shows that improvements are very tightly tied to the abilities trained. The rush to apply ability training to promote cognitive health has produced a vibrant “brain training” industry that neglects the very limited evidence for transfer to significant functional outcomes. Recent evidence on the neural substrates of reading, language comprehension, and discourse processing, as well as on the lifelong effects of literacy engagement in special populations, hints that reading may well be a “whole-brain exercise” with the potential to promote cognitive health. Such findings suggest promise for education-based approaches to promote lifelong cognitive health, calling for (a) societal investment in science at the interface of education and health, in particular to understand the mechanisms through which literacy engagement affects mind, brain, and physical health through the life span, and (b) innovation in developing models of life span education.

The influence of aging on outgroup stereotypes: the mediating role of cognitive and motivational facets of deficient flexibility

BACKGROUND/STUDY CONTEXT: The current study was designed to examine previously reported findings about age-related changes in drawing stereotypic inferences; specifically, that older adults are more likely than younger adults to stereotype outgroup members. The study replicates previous research and extends it by exploring the cognitive and motivational facets of deficient flexibility underlying this effect and comparing stereotypes towards ingroup and outgroup members.

METHODS

In the experiment, younger and older adults read stories that allowed for stereotypic inferences. They also completed the Trail Making Test (TMT) and Need for Closure Scale (NFC) as cognitive and motivational measures of deficient flexibility.

RESULTS

The results of the experiment revealed that, compared to younger participants, older adults were more likely to rely upon stereotypic inferences when they read a story about outgroup members; however, there were no age-group differences in using stereotypes when they read a story about ingroup members. In addition, the findings showed that making more stereotypical inferences by older versus younger adults in relation to outgroup members was mediated by cognitive (TMT) and motivational (NFC) facets of deficient flexibility.

CONCLUSION

A major implication of these findings is that both cognitive and motivational facets of deficient flexibility contribute to the reliance of older adults on stereotypes compared with younger adults. However, this is only true when older adults process information about outgroup members, but not about ingroup members. Thus, the current research goes beyond previous results by providing direct evidence that ingroup-outgroup perception contributes to stereotyping among older participants.

Situation model updating in young and older adults: Global versus incremental mechanisms

Readers construct mental models of situations described by text. Activity in narrative text is dynamic, so readers must frequently update their situation models when dimensions of the situation change. Updating can be incremental, such that a change leads to updating just the dimension that changed, or global, such that the entire model is updated. Here, we asked whether older and young adults make differential use of incremental and global updating. Participants read narratives containing changes in characters and spatial location and responded to recognition probes throughout the texts. Responses were slower when probes followed a change, suggesting that situation models were updated at changes. When either dimension changed, responses to probes for both dimensions were slowed; this provides evidence for global updating. Moreover, older adults showed stronger evidence of global updating than did young adults. One possibility is that older adults perform more global updating to offset reduced ability to manipulate information in working memory.

Effects of age on cognitive control during semantic categorization

We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to study age effects of perceptual (basic-level) vs. perceptual-semantic (superordinate-level) categorization on cognitive control using the go/nogo paradigm. Twenty-two younger (11 M; 21 ± 2.2 years) and 22 older adults (9 M; 63 ± 5.8 years) completed two visual go/nogo tasks. In the single-car task (SiC) (basic), go/nogo responses were made based on single exemplars of a car (go) and a dog (nogo). In the object animal task (ObA) (superordinate), responses were based on multiple exemplars of objects (go) and animals (nogo). Each task consisted of 200 trials: 160 (80%) 'go' trials that required a response through button pressing and 40 (20%) 'nogo' trials that required inhibition/withholding of a response. ERP data revealed significantly reduced nogo-N2 and nogo-P3 amplitudes in older compared to younger adults, whereas go-N2 and go-P3 amplitudes were comparable in both groups during both categorization tasks. Although the effects of categorization levels on behavioral data and P3 measures were similar in both groups with longer response times, lower accuracy scores, longer P3 latencies, and lower P3 amplitudes in ObA compared to SiC, N2 latency revealed age group differences moderated by the task. Older adults had longer N2 latency for ObA compared to SiC, in contrast, younger adults showed no N2 latency difference between SiC and ObA. Overall, these findings suggest that age differentially affects neural processing related to cognitive control during semantic categorization. Furthermore, in older adults, unlike in younger adults, levels of categorization modulate neural processing related to cognitive control even at the early stages (N2).

The role of working memory in inferential sentence comprehension

Existing literature on inference making is large and varied. Trabasso and Magliano (Discourse Process 21(3):255-287, 1996) proposed the existence of three types of inferences: explicative, associative and predictive. In addition, the authors suggested that these inferences were related to working memory (WM). In the present experiment, we investigated whether WM capacity plays a role in our ability to answer comprehension sentences that require text information based on these types of inferences. Participants with high and low WM span read two narratives with four paragraphs each. After each paragraph was read, they were presented with four true/false comprehension sentences. One required verbatim information and the other three implied explicative, associative and predictive inferential information. Results demonstrated that only the explicative and predictive comprehension sentences required WM: participants with high verbal WM were more accurate in giving explanations and also faster at making predictions relative to participants with low verbal WM span; in contrast, no WM differences were found in the associative comprehension sentences. These results are interpreted in terms of the causal nature underlying these types of inferences.

Knowledge differentially supports memory for nutrition information in later life

We examined the extent to which prior knowledge about nutrition moderates age differences in remembering newly learned nutrition information. Younger and older adults with varying levels of knowledge read an article on fats and cholesterol and then completed a memory task. Participants responded to statements that were-or were not-presented in the text, which enabled us to examine memory accuracy overall as well as hits and memory errors. Results showed age differences were present in the low-knowledge group but not in the high-knowledge group. Findings illustrate the importance of knowledge for older adults' memory for health information.

Event segmentation ability uniquely predicts event memory

Memory for everyday events plays a central role in tasks of daily living, autobiographical memory, and planning. Event memory depends in part on segmenting ongoing activity into meaningful units. This study examined the relationship between event segmentation and memory in a lifespan sample to answer the following question: Is the ability to segment activity into meaningful events a unique predictor of subsequent memory, or is the relationship between event perception and memory accounted for by general cognitive abilities? Two hundred and eight adults ranging from 20 to 79years old segmented movies of everyday events and attempted to remember the events afterwards. They also completed psychometric ability tests and tests measuring script knowledge for everyday events. Event segmentation and script knowledge both explained unique variance in event memory above and beyond the psychometric measures, and did so as strongly in older as in younger adults. These results suggest that event segmentation is a basic cognitive mechanism, important for memory across the lifespan.

Aging and Predicting Inferences: A Diffusion Model Analysis

In the domain of discourse processing, it has been claimed that older adults (60-90-year-olds) are less likely to encode and remember some kinds of information from texts than young adults. The experiment described here shows that they do make a particular kind of inference to the same extent that college-age adults do. The inferences examined were "predictive" inferences such as the inference that something bad would happen to the actress for the sentence "The director and cameraman were ready to shoot close-ups when suddenly the actress fell from the 14th story" (McKoon & Ratcliff, 1986). Participants read sentences like the actress one and then later they were asked to decide whether words that expressed an inference (e.g., "dead") had or had not appeared explicitly in a sentence. To directly compare older adults' performance to college-age adults' performance, we used a sequential sampling diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978) to map response times and accuracy onto a single dimension of the strength with which an inference was encoded. On this dimension, there were no significant differences between the older and younger adults.

The Effects of Ageing and Visual Noise on Conceptual Integration during Sentence Reading

The effortfulness hypothesis implies that difficulty in decoding the surface form, as in the case of age-related sensory limitations or background noise, consumes the attentional resources that are then unavailable for semantic integration in language comprehension. Because ageing is associated with sensory declines, degrading of the surface form by a noisy background can pose an extra challenge for older adults. In two experiments, this hypothesis was tested in a self-paced moving window paradigm in which younger and older readers’ online allocation of attentional resources to surface decoding and semantic integration was measured as they read sentences embedded in varying levels of visual noise. When visual noise was moderate (Experiment 1), resource allocation among young adults was unaffected but older adults allocated more resources to decode the surface form at the cost of resources that would otherwise be available for semantic processing; when visual noise was relatively intense (Experiment 2), both younger and older participants allocated more attention to the surface form and less attention to semantic processing. The decrease in attentional allocation to semantic integration resulted in reduced recall of core ideas in both experiments, suggesting that a less organized semantic representation was constructed in noise. The greater vulnerability of older adults at relatively low levels of noise is consistent with the effortfulness hypothesis.

An EMR-based tool to support collaborative planning for medication use among adults with diabetes: design of a multi-site randomized control trial

Patients with type II diabetes often struggle with self-care, including adhering to complex medication regimens and managing their blood glucose levels. Medication nonadherence in this population reflects many factors, including a gap between the demands of taking medication and the limited literacy and cognitive resources that many patients bring to this task. This gap is exacerbated by a lack of health system support, such as inadequate patient-provider collaboration. The goal of our project is to improve self-management of medications and related health outcomes by providing system support. The Medtable™ is an Electronic Medical Record (EMR)-integrated tool designed to support patient-provider collaboration needed for medication management. It helps providers and patients work together to create effective medication schedules that are easy to implement. We describe the development and initial evaluation of the tool, as well as the process of integrating it with an EMR system in general internal medicine clinics. A planned evaluation study will investigate whether an intervention centered on the Medtable™ improves medication knowledge, adherence, and health outcomes relative to a usual care control condition among type II diabetic patients struggling to manage multiple medications.

Aging and perceived event structure as a function of modality

The majority of research on situation model processing in older adults has focused on narrative texts. Much of this research has shown that many important aspects of constructing a situation model for a text are preserved and may even improve with age. However, narratives need not be text-based, and little is known as to whether these findings generalize to visually-based narratives. The present study assessed the impact of story modality on event segmentation, which is a basic component of event comprehension. Older and younger adults viewed picture stories or read text versions of them and segmented them into events. There was comparable alignment between the segmentation judgments and a theoretically guided analysis of shifts in situational features across modalities for both populations. These results suggest that situation models provide older adults with a stable basis for event comprehension across different modalities of expereinces.