week 3 Flashcards
Explain the correlation between top-down control and compensation success (low, medium and high top-down control)
Low top-down control requires little compensation meaning there no need for a lot of activation
medium top down control: the task requires more compensation but not too much meaning that activation occurs
high top down: task requires too much activation and older people cannot do this leading to lower compensation achieved
Related utilization of neural circuits hypothesis (crunch model)
Level of task difficulty impacts performance and brain activation
Increased in brain activation until demands exceed the ability to compensate (crunch point) and then we see a decline
What is the effect of external factors such as brain injury?
brain injury can worsen some cognitive diseases like dementia
What are the two aspects of attention?
excitation and inhibition
explain excitation
automatic function whereby any familiar object, scene, word, leads to automatic mental representation
explain inhibition
since we cannot process all information in the environment at one time, humans pay attention to some stimuli and tune out others
3 inhibitory mechanisms that help with the selection
access, deletion and restraint
Explain access
Access: limiting access to the irrelevant info
Explain deletion
Deleting Infor that is not relevant
explain restraint
restraining function control competing responses
Evidence for the access function comes from two areas of study. Which are?
Semantic priming literature and distractability literature
What is semantic priming literature
broader semantic activation in older than younger adults
what is distractability literature
Older adults show great distractibility because they allow more info to become active in their mental representation (leaky filter)
What does it mean that older people have broader semantic activation than older people?
Imagine a web of connected objects. For instance fire is tied to orange, hot, smoke, firefighters etc. Since older people have more life experience they also have more semantic connections than younger people
Explain the study that identified older people have more semantic connections
condition one: multiple pairs of words were shown that have obvious connections (cat vs. dog)
contion two: pairs of words were shown that have no connection
Results indicated that older people responded more quickly and accurately to connected word pairs
Distractability: older adults show decline in performance in tasks with
additional visual distractors
Example of distractability study
computerized digit substitution: the one in class where numbers represented a symbol.
What were the results of this study?
Older people were far better at the computerized digit substitution, focusing on one item at a time. In the distraction condition, they performed far worse
Explain the N-back test
Is the current picture the same as the last picture
Each picture is superimposed with an irrelevant word
After delay, participants are tested for their knowledge of the irrelevant words
What did the N back test reveal in older people?
Older adults have better knowledge of irrelevant words than younger adults because they attend to the irrelevant information.
What was found with deletion performance in older vs younger people?
older adults have more difficulty than younger adults ignoring/deleting the no longer relevant information
Reading comprehension in older adults. What happened when new information was introduced correcting old info in a story?
Older adults were more likely to keep the original interpretation
What is a span task?
remembering different sets of words
What is the standard span task?
Few words starting and every set increases in size requiring participant to try and remember more and more
opposite direction span task
Start with huge list and each set decreases in size with each line.
In what span task did older people do better at
opposite directions: decreasing set size
Neuro imaging evidence shows that older people cannot tune out irrelevant info.
older adults showed activation in their Para-hippocampal place area when told to attend scenes but they did not decrease activation when told to ignore scenes
What are examples of restraints to strong responses?
Restraint of both motor responses and thoughts
Older adults have a difficult time restraining strong but inappropriate response in the stop-signal task
Popular paradigms: Explain Wisconsin card sorting task
flanker task
go no go trails
Wisconsin: sort cards based on numbers, colours, shapes
flnaker task: respond to the direction of arrows
go no go task: only respond to go trails
What is one unanticipated finding of these tasks?
Older adults had better memory for words that were distracting in picture task meaning that older adults can use distraction to memorize better.
What does it mean that old people use hyper binding
Older adults inability to ignore irrelevant information means they bind more information together
Cognitive control is the ability to
Limit attention to goal-relevant information and inhibit/suppress irrelevant distractions.
How is Cognitive control is a double-edged sword:
Good cognitive control can help or hinder performance depending on the tasks.
Cognitive control benefit?
better at attending to only relevant information and inhibiting irrelevant information
Cognitive control benefits with memory
More efficient at storing only relevant info, preventing/inhibiting irrelevant info
Better memory retrieval by inhibiting irrelevant information from entering memory
cognitive control benefit language
Ignoring distractors during reading, improving reading span and comprehension.
Ignore distractors during listening can also help real-time language processing.
Cognitive control costs: memory
reduced cognitive control is good with implicit memory tests where information was encoded in holistic manner
cognitive control costs: leaarning
less control allows better detection of statistical pattern
cognitive control costs: problem-solving
less control allows for creative and simple solutions to problems
Reduced cognitive control and aging: in comparison to younger people, older adults can
Use distractions to boost their memory and learn new info
Learn more about the world around them
Detect statistical patterns and associations between them
Factors that influence cognitive control: Time of day
Age related differences in circadian ryhtm: peak time for older adults is morning compared to afternoon-evening for younger adults
Factors that reduce cognitive control: Mood
positive mood reduces cognitive control which leads to some of the benefits observed for creative and problem solving tasks
