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Examining Age-Related Enhancement Of Multisensory Gain: The Role Of Sensory Decline And Inverse Effectiveness, Laura C. Schneeberger
Examining Age-Related Enhancement Of Multisensory Gain: The Role Of Sensory Decline And Inverse Effectiveness, Laura C. Schneeberger
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Older adults experience a greater benefit from multisensory integration than their younger counterparts, but it is unclear why. One hypothesis is that age-related sensory decline weakens unisensory stimulus effectiveness, producing a boost in multisensory gain through inverse effectiveness. Many previous studies present stimuli at the same intensity for both younger and older adults (i.e., stimulus-matched), as opposed to accounting for each participant’s unique perceptual ability (i.e., perception-matched). This makes it difficult to discern the source of age-related differences in multisensory gain. Through a combination of stimulus-matched and perception-matched tasks, I found that older adults exhibit enhanced multisensory gain at low …
Investigating The Roles Of The Dorsal And Ventral Striatum In Humor Comprehension And Appreciation Throughout Health, Aging, And Parkinson’S Disease, Maggie Prenger
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Humor processing is thought to involve two distinct components. The first, humor comprehension, involves detecting and resolving incongruities that are present within a humorous stimulus. This is related to cognitive processes such as ambiguity resolution, response inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, functions that are mediated in part by the dorsal portion of the striatum (DS). Humor appreciation, on the other hand, refers to the subjective amusement and mirth that one experiences in response to a joke. This is related to reward processing, which implicates the ventral portion of the striatum (VS). Across three separate studies, we investigated the involvement …
The Coping Strategies Of Older Adults With Age Related Vision Loss (Arvl) – A Narrative Account, Zakara J. Stampp
The Coping Strategies Of Older Adults With Age Related Vision Loss (Arvl) – A Narrative Account, Zakara J. Stampp
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
The goal of this study was to share the stories of older adults with age-related vision loss (ARVL) and how they have coped to maintain meaningful occupational engagement. Grounded in a constructivist paradigm, data collection and analysis were guided by the narrative inquiry methodology. The participants consisted of six older adults aged 60 or older, diagnosed with one of the following ARVL conditions: macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, and/or glaucoma. Participants were recruited from vision loss non-profit organizations such as the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) and the Alliance for Equity of Blind Canadians (AEBC). One older adult was …
Neural Markers Of Musical Memory In Young And Older Adults, Avital Sternin
Neural Markers Of Musical Memory In Young And Older Adults, Avital Sternin
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Memory for music can be preserved in the presence of neurodegenerative disorders even when other memories are forgotten. However, understanding how the brain remembers music has proven difficult despite decades of research. The central goal of this thesis was to elucidate the neural correlates of musical memory by exploring how the presence of language and music information affect the way young and older adults remember music. To that end, I 1) used a controlled training paradigm to familiarize participants with novel stimuli that manipulated the presence of language and music, and 2) collected functional magnetic resonance imaging data to compare …
The Relationship Between Theory Of Mind And Executive Function: Are They Two Facets Of The Same Process Or Two Distinct Processes?, Isu Cho
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
This dissertation examines the relationship between Theory of Mind (ToM) and Executive Function (EF). There has been debate on whether ToM and EF are two facets of the same process or are two distinct processes. Distinguishing between these possibilities empirically is challenging because the two abilities have similar developmental timetables and ToM tasks typically place high demands on EF, with the consequence that ToM and EF performance measures may be artificially correlated. Three experiments explored the nature of this relationship. Experiments 1 and 2 tested whether socio-cultural factors known to influence individual differences in EF (i.e., bilingualism, country-of-origin) extend to …
Category Learning In Older Adulthood: Understanding And Reducing Age-Related Deficits, Rahel R. Rabi
Category Learning In Older Adulthood: Understanding And Reducing Age-Related Deficits, Rahel R. Rabi
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
Executive functions are important for learning rule-based (RB) categories, as well as non-rule-based (NRB) categories (e.g., categories learned implicitly, without a verbal rule). However, executive functioning is known to decline with age, leading to age-related deficits in category learning. The current thesis examines RB and NRB category learning in older adults using category sets that vary in difficulty (e.g., rule complexity, number of stimulus dimensions, salience of stimulus dimensions). In Chapter 2, older adults and younger adults completed three category sets (simple single-dimensional RB, disjunctive RB, and NRB). Older adults learned the simple, single-dimensional rules quite well. In contrast to …