Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Episodic memory (EM) is the collection of past personal experiences that have occurred at a particular time and place. Subjective decline in EM is reported in the elderly with subjective memory decline (SMD). The elderly with SMD have a faster rate of EM decline and a higher risk of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD) than do healthy controls. However, the brain mechanisms of episodic memory impairment in SMD are unclear. Previous studies suggest that even when memory performance has no observable deficits, the brain structure and function associated with EM have been abnormal in SMD. Two further studies are of vital scientific significance for understanding the pathogenesis of AD. One is to explore the abnormal key nodes and paths of memory neural circuits in SMD. The other is to reveal the changes in the neural circuits in the progression of AD. In addition, considering that the elderly with SMD are a special group with memory impairment, an in-depth investigation into the neural circuits in this group, will make a unique contribution to revealing the neural mechanism of human memory.
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： There is still much debate over whether older adults have enhanced or attenuated audiovisual integration. Research on the neural mechanism of audiovisual integration in older adults is needed to provide a scientific brain-health programme based on crossmodal integration. Here, we summarized two parts based on previous studies. First, audiovisual integration ability in older adults is influenced by the characteristics of the physical stimuli, the spatial and temporal relationships of the stimuli, and the attentional allocation. Second, audiovisual integration effects are observed in older adults. On the one hand, older adults showed higher functional connectivity, network efficiency and enhanced audiovisual integration effects, such as stronger activity in the posterior parietal lobe, medial prefrontal lobe, left prefrontal lobe, and the super-additive amplitude of P2 observed in the central prefrontal region. In addition, audiovisual integration in older adults occurred earlier and extended longer than that in younger adults. On the other hand, older adults have slower response times and smaller amplitudes to audiovisual stimuli in the superior temporal gyrus than younger adults, which shows a weaker integration facilitation effect in older adults. The study of audiovisual integration in older adults induced by simple stimuli provides a reliable basis for further revealing the integration mechanism, but the processing mechanism of audiovisual integration for complex situations remains to be explored.
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： As the situation of population aging becomes increasingly severe, the intertemporal choice of older adults has attracted increasing attention. However, previous studies on age-related intertemporal choice have reached inconsistent conclusions. Some studies have found that older adults are more willing to wait for future gains than the young, while others suggest that older adults have the same choice preference as the young or are even more eager for short-term gains. This review attempts to explore the effects of age differences on intertemporal choice from the perspective of the processing of time representation and value representation of the elderly. It further elaborates on the impact of cognitive, motivational and emotional factors on this processing so as to clarify the discrepancies in current studies of age-related changes in intertemporal choice.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Age-related positivity effects refer to the phenomenon that older adults display a preference for positive rather than negative information in cognitive processing. Previous studies using neutral materials have found that WM performance declines with aging. In recent years, empirical and theoretical research have begun to explore the effect of emotional valence on WM performance in the elderly and have revealed an interaction between emotional valance and task-relevance on positivity effects. Positivity effects has been observed in WM studies with emotional valence acting as a kind of task-relevant information. For instance, older people have enhanced performance in WM tasks with positive emotional stimuli, and decreased performance on negative emotional stimuli. In contrast, less attention has focused on the area of emotional valence as task-irrelevant information in WM and conflicting findings also have been reported. Some studies have found that the presence of negative irrelevant emotional stimuli reduces WM performance of older adults, while other studies have found that positive distractors have greater interference on WM of older adults. These remind that both emotional valence and task relevance are critical components in the processing of positivity effects in WM. Preliminary neuroimaging studies have revealed age-related functional changes in the dorsal executive system (including the middle frontal gyrus and the parietal cortex) and ventral affective system (including the left inferior frontal cortex and the amygdala). The middle frontal gyrus and the inferior frontal gyrus are both involved in inhibiting task-irrelevant emotional stimuli in WM and are less activated in older adults than in young adults. More specifically, the middle frontal gyrus is involved in the selection of task-relevant information, while the inferior frontal gyrus plays an important role in resolving interference from emotional distractors within WM. The amygdala, which is deactivated among older adults, is activated in young adults during the processing of negative stimuli. The socioemotional selectivity theory and the dual-competition model have been found to mainly account for age-related positivity effects in WM. The socioemotional selectivity theory, a theory of emotional-motivational life-span development, explains positivity effects from future time perspective, the review of WM studies on age difference with emotional valence as task-relevant information provides empirical support for the socioemotional selectivity theory. The dual competition model emphasizes the influence of task-relevance of emotional materials on WM processing and holds that the difference on cognitive resources required by emotional information as task-relevant stimuli or task-irrelevant stimuli is the key factor that affects WM performance. It has been found that task-relevant emotional materials promote WM performance in older adults, and task-irrelevant emotional contents impair their WM performance, thus the current review of task relevance on WM performance in older adults is consistent with hypothesis of the dual competition model. The dynamic integration theory explains positivity effects from the perspective of cognitive decline. From this perspective greater differences would be observed between young adults and older adults with cognitive impairments, such as Alzheimer's disease patients, but there is a lack of empirical evidence to support the dynamic integration theory. Overall, future studies are warranted to explore the characteristics of emotional processing in different stages of WM in older adults. The event-related potential technique, which has been used to provide time-sensitive assessment of positivity effects in attention, holds great potentials in the study of time course of positivity effects in WM. The potential influences of internal encoding processes of emotional materials (affective words, emotional face, and emotional pictorial materials) on the mechanism of positivity effects in WM should be clarified in future studies. More psychophysiological and neuroimaging studies are needed to uncover the important neural circuits related to the impact of task-relevance of emotion on positivity effects. Finally, the underlying mechanisms and potential benefits of emotional WM training on the improvement of cognitive functions and emotional experience in the elderly should be investigated.
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