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Psychology of Aging - Winter 2015 > Unit 1 - Chapter 2 of Text > Flashcards

Unit 1 - Chapter 2 of Text Flashcards

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1
Q

What are 3 perspectives on the neuroscience of aging?

A

1) Neurophysical approach
2) Correlational approach
3) Activation imaging approach

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2
Q

What is the neurophysical approach to the neuroscience of aging?

A

The neurophysical approach compares brain functioning of healthy older adults with adults displaying various pathological disorders in the brain

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3
Q

What is the correlational approach to the neuroscience of aging?

A

The correlational approach attempts to link measures of cognitive performance of brain structure or functioning

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4
Q

What is the activation imaging approach to the neuroscience aging?

A

The activation imaging approach attempts to directly link functional brain activity with cognitive behavioural data

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5
Q

What is the ventral visual cortex?

A
  • Perceptual region of the brain
  • Highly specialized area that does not shrink with age
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6
Q

Are there cultural differences attached to age-related changes in perceptual processing?

A
  • Some age-related changes in perceptual processing do not show cultural differences, whereas others do
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7
Q

What is an example of cultural differences in perceptual processing?

A

Older adults from Western cultures showed significantly greater object-processing adaptation in the lateral occipital complex, which is involved in visual processing. East Asians showed almost no adaptation

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8
Q

What is the lateral occipital complex?

A

Area involved in visual processing

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9
Q

Define: Cognitive task

A

Any of a range of basic tasks which require only a small number of mental processes and which have easily specified correct outcomes

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10
Q

With respect to cognitive tasks, what kind of activation levels do older adults show?

A

Older adults show reduced activation in regions associated with particular cognitive task

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11
Q

What are the results of studies focusing on verbal working memory and long-term memory?

A

Initial studies focusing on verbal working memory and long-term memory presented evidence for focal, unilateral activity in the left prefrontal region in younger adults and bilateral activation in older adults when performing the same tasks

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12
Q

Does the older brain work harder?

A

Controversy as to whether the older brain works harder (using bilateral activation) to compensate for deterioration in the regions related to a cognitive task, or is its inefficient operation of inhibitory mechanisms rendering the activation as interference to optimal functioning?

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13
Q

What is bilateral activation?

A
  • Bilateral - using both sides of the brain
  • Activation - the brain being used
  • Therefore, the brain using both the left and right prefrontal areas
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14
Q

What function could bilateral activation serve in older adults?

A

Bilateral activation in older adults may serve a functional and supportive role in their cognitive functioning

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15
Q

Is there an association between bilateral activation and higher performance in older adults?

A

Yes, in tasks including category learning tasks, visual field tasks, and various memory tasks

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16
Q

What is the scaffolding theory of cognitive aging (STAC)?

A

Functional changes with aging are part of a lifespan process of compensatory cognitive scaffolding that is an attempt to alleviate the cognitive declines associated with aging.

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17
Q

What have behavioural studies shown regarding aging, decline, and preservation?

A

Behavioral studies have shown that aging is associated with both decline as well as preservation of selective cognitive abilities.

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18
Q

What is the frontal cortex?

A

The frontal cortex is involved in higher order, executive functions such as the ability to make and carry out plans, switch between tasks, and maintain attention and focus

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19
Q

What is the cerebellar cortex?

A
  • It contains the cerebellum
  • The thin gray surface layer of the cerebellum, consisting of an outer molecular layer and an inner granular layer.
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20
Q

What do postmortem studies demonstrate about shrinkage in the aging brain?

A
  • Shrinkage is selective versus global
  • Prefrontal cortex, hippocampus (associated with memory) and cerebellum show profound shrinkage
  • Sensory cortices, such as the visual cortex shows little shrinkage
  • The white matter also shows deterioration with age
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21
Q

What is diffusion tensor imaging (DTI)?

A
  • Neuroimaging method
  • Assesses the rate and direction that water diffuses the white matter
  • This gives a reading of the health of the white matter, it also measures its density
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22
Q

Age-related changes in brain activity

A
  • fMRI examines how changes in brain activity occur in correspondence to changes in task demands and the type of cognitive functioning under investigation
  • Interested in the functional consequences of age-related deterioration in specific brain structures
  • Do older adults in comparison to younger adults recruit different regions of the brain in order to perform cognitive tasks more effectively?
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23
Q

What are the functional consequences of brain deterioration?

A
  • Many age related declines in cognitive functioning are a function of insults to the frontal lobes, structurally, and neurochemically
  • Functional neuroimaging examines the neural substrates of cognitive decline
  • Reduced activation in older adults in prefrontal and medial-temporal (underside of the brain, under the hippocampus) areas supporting cognitive functioning such as memory
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24
Q

What are neural substrates?

A

Term used to indicate a part of the nervous or brain system that underlies a specific behaviour or psychological state

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25
Q

What is working memory?

A
  • Linked to executive functioning and involves temporary storage and processing of information, which supports higher-order cognitive functioning
26
Q

What is the anterior cingulate cortex?

A

The anterior cingulate cortex is affiliated with the prefrontal cortex and is also involved in executive control

27
Q

When does reduced brain activation or under recruitment occur?

A

Reduced brain activation or under recruitment of the prefrontal cortex occurs during intentional cognitive processing.

28
Q

What is the BOLD response?

A
  • Neural activity is electricity and chemicals moving around the brain
  • fMRI’s don’t measure that electricity or chemicals directly, instead it measures the oxygen content of blood in different parts of the brain
  • The more brain cells fire, the more oxygen they use. These changes in the use of oxygen as the results of neural firing is called the BOLD response
  • Using fMRI you can measure BOLD which shows up on film as blobs of activation (activity)
29
Q

What does it mean when a region of the brain is “activated”?

A

If there’s activity in a certain part of the brain it means one of 3 things:

1) That part of the brain is sending more outputs
2) That part of the brain is receiving more inputs
3) That part of the brain is doing internal processing, or “talking to itself”
- 80% of BOLD signals are caused by internal processing
- 20% of BOLD signals are caused by input/output

30
Q

What is is “under-recruitment”?

A

Reduced brain activity

31
Q

Reduced frontal recruitment in aging is context dependent - what does this mean?

A

Older adults show reduced activation or recruitment of the appropriate frontal regions associated with intentional memory

32
Q

What is “intetional memory”?

A
  • Study conditions in which particpants are forewarned that they will be tested on material to which they are explosed
  • Older adults recruit (or use) these regions to the same degree as younger people if support is offered during or memory encoding task
  • This may be because of a decreased flexibility on the part of older adults to produce effective retrieval strategies
33
Q

What is the ventral visual cortex?

A
  • This is the perceptual region of the brain
  • Highly specialized area that shows little shrinkage with age
  • Some age-related changes in perceptual processing do not show cultural differences, whereas other areas do
34
Q

What is the default network of the brain?

A
  • Regions of the brain that are most active at rest
  • When an individual lies quietly in the magnetic imaging machine and is not directly engaged in a cognitive task
  • When an individual begins a demanding cognitive task, this default network is suppressed
  • Researchers have found that older adults display less suppression of this default network than younger adults and that this is related to lower cognitive performance
  • This failure to shift from a resting state to a more active state to engage in cognitive processing may be another reason for increased frontal activity in older adults
35
Q

What is scaffolding?

A

Scaffolding is the support given during the learning process which is tailored to the needs of the student with the intention of helping the student achieve his/her learning goals

36
Q

What does the Scaffolding Theory of Aging and Cognitive (STAC) model suggest about older adults?

A
  • The reason older adults continue to perform at high levels despite neuronal deterioration is because of compensatory scaffolding
  • This is the recruitment of additional circuitry to bolster functional decline
  • A difference between this model and others is that compensation is not simply a neural response to brain insults as we grow older, but the brain’s response to challenge in general
  • We may see this occurring when younger adults are learning a new task
  • Learning moves from effortful processing to overlearning
37
Q

What is compensatory scaffolding?

A
  • There are declines with age in speed of processing, working memory, inhibitory function, long-term memory, decreases in brain structure size, and white matter integrity
  • In the face of these decreases, fMRI’s have demonstrated reliable increases in prefrontal activation
  • The scaffolding theory of aging and cognition (STAC) provides an integrative view of the aging mind, suggesting that pervasive increased frontal activation with age is a marker of an adaptive brain that engages in compensatory scaffolding
  • This is to compensate for declining neural structures and function
  • Scaffolding is a normal process present across the lifespan that involves use and development of complementary, alternative neural circuits to achieve a particular cognitive goal
  • Scaffolding is protective of cognitive function in the aging brain, and available evidence suggests that the ability to use this mechanism is strengthened by cognitive engagement, exercise, and low levels of default network engagement.
38
Q

What are some of the characteristics of normal brain aging?

A
  • It is an inevitable process characterized by a selective pattern of structural changes
  • These processes arise as a consequence of cumulative effects over the lifespan, including stress and mood effects, which drive different micro- and macro-structural alterations in the brain.
  • Age has an impact on white matter volume - stress and mood influence brain volumetry across the lifespan.
  • There is a profound effect on the left hemisphere from the interaction of aging/stress/mood
39
Q

Define episodic memory

A
  • Episodic memory is the memory of autobiographical events (times, places, associated emotions, and other contextual who, what, when, where, why knowledge) that can be explicitly stated.
  • It is the collection of past personal experiences that occurred at a particular time and place.
40
Q

Define semantic memory

A
  • A portion of long-term memory that processes ideas and concepts that are not drawn from personal experience.
  • Semantic memory includes things that are common knowledge, such as the names of colors, the sounds of letters, the capitals of countries and other basic facts acquired over a lifetime.
41
Q

Define: working memory

A

The part of short-term memory that is concerned with immediate conscious perceptual and linguistic processing.

42
Q

Define: inhibitory control

A

Inhibitory control is an important component of executive function that allows for the suppression of actions and resistance to interference from irrelevant stimuli.

43
Q

Define: hemispheric asymmetry

A

The difference in the mental functions controlled by the left and right cerebral hemispheres of the brain

44
Q

What is the HAROLD model?

A

Hemispheric Asymmetry Reduction in Older Adults

  • A model of the effects of aging on brain activity during cognitive performance
  • Prefrontal activity during cognitive performances tends to be less lateralized in older adults than in younger adults.
  • The model is supported by functional neuroimaging and other evidence in the domains of episodic memory, semantic memory, working memory, perception, and inhibitory control.
  • Age-related hemispheric asymmetry reductions may have a compensatory function or they may reflect a dedifferentiation process.
  • They may have a cognitive or neural origin, and they may reflect regional or network mechanisms
45
Q

What is dedifferentiation?

A
  • Reversion of a specialized cell or tissue to an unspecificed form
  • May occur before the regeneration of appendages in plants anc certain animals in the development of some cancers.
46
Q

What is the CRUNCH model?

A

Compensation-Related Utilization of Neural Circuits Hypothesis (CRUNCH)

  • Working memory function declines across the lifespan
  • Models of aging attribute memory impairments to reduced distinctiveness between neural representations of different mental states in old age, a phenomenon termed dedifferentiation
  • Models predict that neural distinctiveness should be reduced uniformly across experimental conditions in older adults.
  • In contrast, CRUNCH predicts that the distinctiveness of neural representations should be increased in older adults (relative to young adults) at low levels of task demand but reduced at high levels of demand.
47
Q

What do studies show about increased frontal bilaterality and decreased hippocampal activity?

A
  • A number of studies show evidence for increased frontal bilaterality (frontal = frontal lobe and bilaterality = working both hemispheres) and decreased hippocampal activity in older adults across numerous tasks including attention, working memory, and long-term memory suggesting the global nature of this phenomenon
  • Additional age-related neural activation (especially in prefrontal areas) may be functional and adaptive for optimal performance
  • Researchers now suggest that these activation patterns may reflect an adaptive brain that functionaly reorganizes
48
Q

What is the difference between young people and older adults when it comes to unilateral and bilateral use of the brain?

A
  • Numerous studies have documented the fact that younger adults show unilateral brain activation when performing various cognitive tasks
  • In contrast, older adults’ brains tend to show increased activation in both brain hemispheres
49
Q

What are supplementary processes?

A
  • When different brain regions are activated to compensate for lacking processing resources
  • Reduced lateralization is one way of recruiting additional resources
  • Older brains also show overactivation in different brain regions, suggesting that compensation can take different forms in the aging brain
50
Q

What is a compensational framework?

A

Parts of the brain that are not working adequately are compensated for by other parts of the brain … other parts compensate for weakness

51
Q

What is neural plasticity?

A
  • The interaction between the brain and the environment and is mostly used to describe the effects of experience on the structure
  • Plasticity is a multi-faceted concept that applies across the life span
  • It can refer to the ability to compensate for declining performance from a behavioural perspective or to the reorganization of neural circuitry as a form of compensation from a neurosicence perspective
52
Q

What is neural distinctiveness?

A
  • Working memory function declines across the lifespan.
  • Computational models of aging attribute such memory impairments to reduced distinctiveness between neural representations of different mental states in old age, a phenomenon termed dedifferentiation.
  • These models predict that neural distinctiveness should be reduced uniformly across experimental conditions in older adults.
53
Q

How can older adults improve their cognitive abiilty in memory tasks?

A

Older adults are able to improve cognitive ability in memory tasks through tailored strategy trainings beyond the level of untrained younger adults

54
Q

What are neural stem cells?

A

Cells that produce new neurons

55
Q

What is neurogenisis?

A

Development of new neurons

56
Q

What effect do enriched environmentd, versus deprived environmentd have on older adults learning spatial tasks?

A
  • When older mice were exposed to enriched environments, they performed much better on spatial memory tasks (the ability to remember the position or location of objects and places) than mice in deprived conditions.
  • This was demonstrated by changes in the structure of the brain.
57
Q

What can be done to preserve hippocampal volume in older adults?

A
  • Higher aerobic fitness levels are associated with the preservation of hippocampal volume
  • Higher aerobic fitness levels are also associated with better performance on sptial memory tasks
  • A larger hippocampal volume is the most important predictor of better spatial memory functions
58
Q

What have been the findings of experiments on older mice with respect to newly generated neurons?

A

Physical exercise in elderly mice enhanced the number of newly generated neurons about 5 imes and this was associated with improved performance

59
Q

In order for exercise to be effective when does the subject have to start exercising?

A
  • Exercising can start very late in life
  • Even in advanced stages of aging, the brain retains its capacity to react to external stimuli that are related to improved congitive performance.
60
Q

Is new learning related to structural changes in the brain?

A
  • New learning has been linked to structural changes in the brain
  • Evidence indicates that hippocampal volume increases in students after extensive studying for an exam
61
Q

What is method of loci mnemonic strategies to improve memory?

A
  • Mentally positioning things-to-remember in a well-known room.
  • Imagine a very familiar place, such as a well-known street, building or room, which has many distinctive locations.
  • Imagine yourself walking through, for example, this room, carefully examining each location. For example, imagine walking in the door, turning right, seeing the bookcase, walking to the bookcase, looking at it, walking past it to the fireplace, looking in the fireplace, etc…
  • Now, make up a vivid, concrete list of everything that you need to remember. For example, the five things that you need to buy for a birthday party (e.g. cake, candles, balloons, present and music).
  • Associate each item with a location in the room. Imagine it as vividly as you can.
  • Walk through the room and look in each location, seeing the item where you placed in it.
62
Q

Define: social neuroscience

A
  • Social neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field devoted to understanding how biological systems implement social processes and behavior, and to using biological concepts and methods to inform and refine theories of social processes and behavior.

Psychology of Aging - Winter 2015 (7 decks)

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