Week 10 RF-Cognition-emotion interactions in (un)successful ageing

Question 1

What is (Un)successful ageing? (Samanez-Larkin & Knutson, 2015)

Answer 1

Cognitive change across adulthood:
-Crystallised cognitive ability involves accumulative knowledge (beneficial to an environment well familiar with)

-Fluid cognitive ability is the capacity to process and respond to the environment (innovative thinking)

-Crystallised ability increases slow but steady as people get older whereas fluid ability decreases linear as people get older

Context-dependent performance peaks:
-Younger tend to do best in novel environments using fluid cognitive abilitys yet tend to be outperformed by older groups with crystallised thinking

Question 2

What is successful ageing as maintenance? (Spreng & Turner, 2019)

Answer 2

-Fluid cognitive tasks fall under 3 processes: 1. Speed of processing (ability to attend to environment and make a quick decision) assesses how quick you are responding to the environment

2. Working memory (the ability to maintain relevance e.g., being an active listener)
3. Long-term memory (the extent it requires retrieval of a specific moment)

-Crystallised cognitive tasks fall under the world knowledge process (assessed using vocabulary tasks)

-Performance is preserved with increasing age for world knowledge

-Performance declines with increasing age for speed of processing, working memory and LTM

• Successful agers/”super-agers” (35+ years) (Chen et al., 2022; Katsumi et al., 2021)
• Those who perform similarly to young adults (20-34 yrs) on tasks indexing fluid cognition (processing speed, working memory, episodic memory, fluid intelligence)
• show minimal fluid cognitive decline across time (i.e., start higher but decline more slowly)

Question 3

What is successful ageing as maintenance? (Katsumi et al., 2021)

Answer 3

-When comparing successful vs typical agers there is better episodic memory performance seen (larger differences in middle-aged and young-old) (this was a surprise test so no preparation i.e., more natural)

-The level of neural differentiation regarding brain responses (super agers show higher levels of neural differentiation whereas typical agers have lower levels)

Question 4

What is Successful ageing as adjustment to limited time horizons? (Mather & Carstensen, 2005)

Answer 4

 Socioemotional selectivity theory
(Carstensen, 2003)

 Advancing age is associated with
increased motivation to derive emotional meaning

-Shown different images with different emotional expressions

-Young adults were good at recalling positive and negative images but not neutral

-Middle-aged and old adults had superior positive image recall, then negative (bigger difference between positive and negative in older adults), and neutral last

Question 5

What is successful ageing as an adjustment to limited fluid cognitive resources? (Spreng & Turner, 2021)

Answer 5

-When testing autobiographical memory and probing events: Older adults report a greater ratio of semantic vs episodic details. personal reflections lack episodic richness

-When testing real world memory, they had implicit functional relations support episodic associative learning in everyday life: Older and younger adults correctly learn functional associations. Age differences in associative memory largely eliminated compared to non-functional condition

-When relearning old stories and asked to recall the altered story after the delay period: Older adults more likely to incorrectly recount the original version of the fairytale

-When resisting false information e.g., lying about the biggest ocean, older adults are more likely to correctly say the pacific

-When problem solving, and looking at patterns: Older & younger adults perform similarly (learn patterns) BUT older adults perform worse (expecting patterns)

-When testing everyday problem solving, they were asked to generate a narrative wherein the watch is found: Older adults’ solutions were less rich because they relied mostly on semantic prior knowledge rather than episodic details.

The shift from “explore” to “exploit” happens when:
 Prior knowledge is relevant (in the present
context/task)
 There are few available cognitive resources
 Younger adults can shift flexibly between
“explore” and “exploit”
 Older adults are thought to be mostly
“confined” to the “exploit” mode

Question 6

What is the link between ageing and reward processing? (Samanez-Larkin et al. , 2007)

Answer 6

-Younger and older adults recruit similar brain regions when anticipating a future reward with the ventral striatum and nucleus accumbens for positive anticipating a win whereas the anterior insula when anticipating a loss.

-Increased responsiveness in the reward system when anticipating a financial win

-Younger adults show a typical response of the anterior insula when anticpating a loss yet in older adults, this is not reflected

Question 7

What is the link between ageing and reward processing with the delay of gratification? (Samanez-Larkin et al. , 2007)

Answer 7

 Younger adults show greater activation in the ventral striatum (VS) in response to immediate relative to delayed rewards, implying greater valuation of immediate rewards (i.e., poorer ability to delay gratification)

 Older adults show similar VS responses to immediate and delayed rewards, potentially suggestive of superior delay of gratification abilities (potentially they have a balanced representation valuing both rewards more)

Question 8

What is reward-based learning like in younger adults? (Gruber et al., 2016)

Answer 8

-Participants were presented with objects represented against a screen and asked to make judgements

-Had a surprise memory task outside the scanner

-Individuals tend to have better memory performance for objects associated with higher reward

Question 9

What is the link between ageing and reward-based learning? (Bowen et al., 2020)

Answer 9

-Asked to recall the picture and intentionally encode the pictures

-With the memory task, they are presented with old and new pictures rating their memory

 Younger (20-33 years) and older (60-78 years) participants had to memorise pictures for a subsequent memory test (24 hrs later)

 Each picture was preceded by a reward cue indicating how much money participants could earn if they correctly recalled the picture

 Older adults showed greater correlation in activity between reward-relevant brain areas and the IFG (an area linked to cognitive control) when encoding high reward pictures which were subsequently correctly recalled (vs forgotten); the younger adults show a similar effect only on low reward trials

 For older adults, reward-based learning seems to need greater cognitive control support

Question 10

What is the link between curiousity and reward-based learning in young adults? (Gruber et al., 2014)

Answer 10

-Younger adults are presented with previous questions and had to rate curiosity and wanting to know the answer

-The more curious they are, the greater activation in the nucleus accumbens

-Greater curiosity meant those items were recalled better

Question 11

What is the link between curiousity and reward-based learning in young adults? (Swirsky & Spaniol, 2023)

Answer 11

-Used similar paradigm to Gruber but with older adults

-Participants had to make a whole new judgement on what the correct answer was and had to rate how confident they felt (could they recall it?)

-The higher the curiosity the greater the correct recalls (their memory was boosted better than younger adults)

 Curiosity enhances memory accuracy (“hit probability”) more strongly among older (relative to younger) adults (A)

 Curiosity fosters memory precision (lower “false alarm probability”) more strongly among older (relative to younger) adults, an effect that is strongest in response to novel items semantically related to the study items (“related lures”) (B).

Question 12

What are the motivation effects on reward processing and the age-related positivity effect? (Carstensen & DeLiema, 2018; Mather, 2016)

Answer 12

Shift from a preferential focus on negative information in early life to a preferential focus on positive information from middle-age onwards

Positivity effect in attention, working memory, episodic memory (linked to limited
time horizons, Socioemotional Selectivity Theory, Carstensen et al.,, 2003)

The effect seems stronger in older individuals with superior cognitive control
resources when the task context allows them to implement those resources
(Mather & Knight, 2005; Petrican et al., 2013)

Goal-directed cognitive processing, which may also impact emotion regulation
strategies

Question 13

What is the link between ageing and the positivity effect? Emotion regulation choice 1 (DiGirolamo et al., 2023)

Answer 13

 Relative to younger adults, older adults are less likely to use negative emotion downregulation (“Neg Down”)

 The opposite trend is observed for positive emotion upregulation (“Pos uP”)

Question 14

What is the link between ageing and the positivity effect? Emotion regulation choice 2 (Growney & English, 2023)

Answer 14

 With advancing age, adults tend to
increase use of positive engagement
strategies to regulate emotions triggered
by low arousal films presented in the lab

• Positive engagement:
• Savouring: “I concentrated on my
  pleasant feelings”
• Positive reappraisal: “I thought about
  the positive aspects of the film”
• Positive expression: “I tried to smile
  and show more positive emotion.”

 Relative to younger adults, older adults with higher (but not lower) fluid cognitive ability are more likely to use positive engagement strategies with negative stimuli

Question 15

What was found with environment-specificty with ageing and the positivity effect? (DiGirolamo et al., 2023)

Answer 15

 Both younger and older adults show a positivity effect in the lab

 Older and middle-aged adults show a greater focus on negative information at home (relative to the lab)