Psychology Commons^™

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 …

Changes In Audiovisual Integration In Aging, Alyssa S. Lynn

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

The proposed study will examine changes in audiovisual integration between younger and older adults. Audiovisual integration enables us to associate and bind related auditory and visual information and experience it as a single percept (Spence, 2007). Being able to properly integrate is crucial in our everyday lives. When perceiving speech, audiovisual integration binds visual information from lip movements with auditory information from the speaker's utterances so that speech can be perceived multimodally. With age, our auditory and visual sensory acuity tends to decline with audiovisual integration being impacted as a result (Brooks et al., 2018; Mahoney et al., 2011). We …

Driving Habits, Cognition, And Health-Related Quality Of Life In Middle-Aged And Older Adults With Hiv, Josiah J. Robinson, Tess Walker, Cierra Hopkins, Brittany Bradley, Peggy Mckie, Jennifer S. Frank, Caitlin N. Pope, Pariya L. Fazeli, David E. Vance

Graduate Center for Gerontology Faculty Publications

Cognitive impairment is known to increase with aging in people living with HIV (PLWH). Impairment in cognitive domains required for safe driving may put PLWH at risk for poor driving outcomes, decreased mobility, and health-related quality of life (HRQoL). This study described the driving behaviors of middle-aged and older PLWH and examined correlations between driving behaviors and cognitive functioning (Aim 1), and driving behaviors and HRQoL domains (Aim 2). A sample of 260 PLWH ages 40 and older completed a comprehensive assessment including a battery of cognitive tests, an HRQoL measure, and a measure of self-reported driving habits. Associations between …

Do Emotion Words Influence Age Effects In Delayed Match-To-Sample Performance For Emotional Faces?, Ying-Han Li

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Age differences are apparent in using verbal labels of emotion to categorize emotion face stimuli. Particularly, older adults have more difficulty detecting emotion cues like anger and fear relative to younger adults, but seem to have less difficulty with disgust cues. However, age differences are diminished in situations when participants are limited to two possible emotion choices or are required to simply match stimuli based on emotion cues without the use of labels. One question that emerges from the disparities in these findings is the role that emotion labels themselves play in driving possible age differences in emotion perception. The …

Outdoor Air Pollution Exposure And Inter-Relation Of Global Cognitive Performance And Emotional Distress In Older Women, Andrew J. Petkus, Xinhui Wang, Daniel P. Beavers, Helena C. Chui, Mark A. Espeland, Margaret Gatz, Tara Gruenewald, Joel D. Kaufman, Joann E. Manson, Susan M. Resnick, James D. Stewart, Gregory A. Wellenius, Eric A. Whitsel, Keith Widaman, Diana Younan, Jiu-Chiuan Chen

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

The interrelationships among long-term ambient air pollution exposure, emotional distress and cognitive decline in older adulthood remain unclear. Long-term exposure may impact cognitive performance and subsequently impact emotional health. Conversely, exposure may initially be associated with emotional distress followed by declines in cognitive performance. Here we tested the inter-relationship between global cognitive ability, emotional distress, and exposure to PM2.5 (particulate matter with aerodynamic diameter 2 (nitrogen dioxide) in 6118 older women (aged 70.6 ± 3.8 years) from the Women’s Health Initiative Memory Study. Annual exposure to PM_2.5 (interquartile range [IQR] = 3.37 μg/m³) and NO₂ (IQR …

The Project Talent Twin And Sibling Study: Zygosity And New Data Collection, Carol A. Prescott, Ellen E. Walters, Thalida Em Arpawong, Catalina Zavala, Tara L. Gruenewald, Margaret Gatz

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

The Project Talent Twin and Sibling (PTTS) study includes 4481 multiples and their 522 nontwin siblings from 2233 families. The sample was drawn from Project Talent, a U.S. national longitudinal study of 377,000 individuals born 1942–1946, first assessed in 1960 and representative of U.S. students in secondary school (Grades 9–12). In addition to the twins and triplets, the 1960 dataset includes 84,000 siblings from 40,000 other families. This design is both genetically informative and unique in facilitating separation of the ‘common’ environment into three sources of variation: shared by all siblings within a family, specific to twin-pairs, and associated with …

The Influence Of Aging, Gaze Direction, And Context On Emotion Discrimination Performance, Alyssa Renee Minton

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study examined how younger and older adults differ in their ability to discriminate between pairs of emotions of varying degrees of similarity when presented with an averted or direct gaze in either a neutral, congruent, or incongruent emotional context. For Task 1, participants were presented with three blocks of emotion pairs (i.e., anger/disgust, sadness/disgust, and fear/disgust) and were asked to indicate which emotion was being expressed. The actors’ gaze direction was manipulated such that emotional facial expressions were depicted with a direct gaze or an averted gaze. For Task 2, the same stimuli were placed into emotional contexts (e.g., …

Implicit Attitudes Of Asian American Older Adults Toward Aging, Anita Ho

Scripps Senior Theses

Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz (1998) developed the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a measure of mental associations between target pairs and positive or negative attributes. Highly associative categories yield faster responses than the reverse mental associations, which is thought to reflect implicit attitudes toward stereotypes. The present study investigated the effect of ethnic group on one’s implicit attitudes toward aging and gender stereotypes by comparing two groups of older adults, Asian Americans and Caucasian Americans, that likely hold different culture values. Past qualitative studies have established the existence of mental health stigma in Asian American populations, including negative Asian American perceptions …

Assessing Working Memory In Mild Cognitive Impairment With Serial Order Recall, Sheina Emrani

Theses and Dissertations

Background: Working memory (WM) is often assessed with serial order tests such as repeating digits backward. In prior dementia research using the Backward Digit Span subtest (BDT) only aggregate test performance was examined. The current research tallied primacy/ recency effects; out-of-sequence transposition errors; perseverations and omissions to assess WM deficits in patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Methods: Memory clinic patients (n= 66) were classified into three groups - single domain amnestic MCI (aMCI), combined mixed domain/ dysexecutive MCI (mixed/dys MCI), and non-MCI where patients did not meet criteria for MCI. Serial order/ WM ability was assessed by …

Through The Ear, To The Brain: How Cognitive Aging Impacts Veridical And False Hearing In The Presence Of Misleading Context, Eric Failes

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A consistent finding in the literature (Benichov, Cox, Tun, & Wingfield, 2012; Dubno, Ahlstrom, & Horwitz, 2000; Hutchinson, 1989; Nittrouer & Boothroyd, 1990; Pichora-Fuller, Schneider & Daneman, 1995; Rogers, Jacoby, & Sommers, 2012; Sommers & Danielson, 1999; Wingfield, Aberdeen, & Stine, 1991) is that spoken word identification improves for both older and younger adults following the addition of a meaningful semantic context, but the improvements are typically greater for older adults. However, more recent findings (Jacoby, Rogers, Bishara, & Shimizu, 2012; Rogers, Jacoby, & Sommers, 2012) suggest that, especially under less favorable perceptual conditions, the increased benefits of semantic context …

Aging And The Perception Of Coherent Motion, Lindsey Marie Shain

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The aperture problem describes an effect by which a contoured stimulus, moving behind an aperture with both ends occluded, appears to move in a direction perpendicular to its own orientation. Mechanisms within the human visual system allow us to overcome this problem and integrate many of these locally ambiguous signals into the perception of globally coherent motion. In the current experiment, younger and older observers viewed displays composed of either 64 or 9 straight contours, arranged in varying orientations and moving behind circular apertures. Because these lines moved behind apertures, their individual local motions were ambiguous with respect to direction …

Combined Mnemonic Strategy Training And High-Definition Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation For Memory Deficits In Mild Cognitive Impairment, Benjamin M. Hampstead, Krishnankutty Sathian, Marom Bikson, Anthony Y. Stringer

Publications and Research

Introduction: Memory deficits characterize Alzheimer’s dementia and the clinical precursor stage known as mild cognitive impairment. Nonpharmacologic interventions hold promise for enhancing functioning in these patients, potentially delaying functional impairment that denotes transition to dementia. Previous findings revealed that mnemonic strategy training (MST) enhances long-term retention of trained stimuli and is accompanied by increased blood oxygen level–dependent signal in the lateral frontal and parietal cortices as well as in the hippocampus. The present study was designed to enhance MST generalization, and the range of patients who benefit, via concurrent delivery of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).

Methods: This protocol describes …

Age-Related Differences In Context-Specificity Benefits Ambiguous Predictive Learning, Catherine Luna

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

The present study investigated age differences in the context-specificity effect in learning. Ambiguity was manipulated in two conditions in a predictive learning paradigm (Callejas-Aguilera & Rosas, 2010) to encourage participants to attend to context. In the ambiguous condition, foods led to the presence of the illness equally as often as its absence. In the non-ambiguous condition, foods consistently led to the presence of the illness or consistently lead to its absence. Participants were instructed to make predictive judgments for foods leading to the presence of an illness in one of two restaurant contexts. During the test, participants made predictive judgments …

Emotion Regulation In Relation To Cognitive Functioning In The Preclinical Stages Of Dementia, Erica P. Meltzer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Emotion regulation (ER) is essential for effective functioning in daily life. Research suggests that ER improves in older adulthood despite concomitant declines in cognition and the presumed neural substrates of ER. The current understanding of ER in older adulthood, and particularly of the relationship between ER and cognition in older adulthood, is limited. This is likely because the construct of ER is challenging to operationalize and, therefore, difficult to study.

The current study investigates ER in relation to cognitive functioning, specifically executive functioning and memory, in individuals with varying degrees of cognitive difficulties (i.e., in the preclinical stages of dementia). …

The Effects Of Age And Task On Visual Emotion Processing, Nicole Elaine Chambers

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Younger adults’ perception of and attention to facial stimuli are enhanced by positive and negative emotional expressions, with negativity leading to a greater benefit than positivity. Conversely, older adults demonstrate a positivity bias, devoting more attention to positive stimuli and less to negative. It is unclear if age differences in these attentional preferences emerge due to differences in how their perceptual systems respond to positive and negative stimuli. Emotional facial expressions elicit enhanced P1 and N170 components of visually-evoked event-related potentials (ERP) over posterior scalp regions associated with vision. The current study examined the extent to which angry and happy …

Carol Barnes: A Prominent Voice In The Neuroscience Of Aging, And A Proponent Of Women In Neuroscience, Kara Sherva

Sound Neuroscience: An Undergraduate Neuroscience Journal

Dr. Barnes, as a professor and a graduate mentor, is constantly in contact with the new generation of women neuroscientists, helping shape their future career paths and providing them with an uncountable number of resources. Barnes’ research is centered on the changes that happen in learning, memory and behavior in normal aging, rather than in neurological diseases.

Young And Older Adults’ Beliefs About Effective Ways To Mitigate Age-Related Memory Decline, Michael Horhorta, Tara T. Lineweaver, Monique Ositelu, Kristi Summers, Christopher Herzog

Tara T. Lineweaver

This study investigated whether young and older adults vary in their beliefs about the impact of various mitigating factors on age-related memory decline. Eighty young (ages 18–23) and eighty older (ages 60–82) participants reported their beliefs about their own memory abilities and the strategies that they use in their everyday lives to attempt to control their memory. Participants also reported their beliefs about memory change with age for hypothetical target individuals who were described as using (or not using) various means to mitigate memory decline. There were no age differences in personal beliefs about control over current or future memory …

Memory, Cognition, And The Effect Of A Music Intervention On Healthy Older Adults, Shannon L. Bowles

Theses and Dissertations--Gerontology

Music is a powerful modality that can bring about changes in individuals of all ages. This research employed both an experimental and quasi-experimental design to identify the effects of music as it influenced psychological well-being, memory, and cognition among older adults. Specifically, it addressed three aims: (a) To determine to what extent learning to play a music instrument later in life influenced psychological well-being and cognitive function of non-institutionalized healthy seniors, (b) To determine the effects of the amount of music involvement on psychological well-being and cognitive function (c) To determine the benefit of music for those with limited/no music …

Young And Older Adults’ Beliefs About Effective Ways To Mitigate Age-Related Memory Decline, Michael Horhorta, Tara T. Lineweaver, Monique Ositelu, Kristi Summers, Christopher Herzog

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This study investigated whether young and older adults vary in their beliefs about the impact of various mitigating factors on age-related memory decline. Eighty young (ages 18–23) and eighty older (ages 60–82) participants reported their beliefs about their own memory abilities and the strategies that they use in their everyday lives to attempt to control their memory. Participants also reported their beliefs about memory change with age for hypothetical target individuals who were described as using (or not using) various means to mitigate memory decline. There were no age differences in personal beliefs about control over current or future memory …

Age Differences In Bimanual Coordination, Paul Amrhein, George Stelmach, Noreen Goggin

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

A bimanual coordination experiment was conducted in which two groups of 10 male and female participants, elderly (67 to 75 years of age) and young (21 to 25 years of age), produced unimanual, bimanual symmetrical (equal extent amplitude), and bimanual asymmetrical (unequal extent amplitude) movements. In addition to an overall increase in performance latency, the elderly group exhibited a linear increase in response initiation (RT) with increases in task complexity similar to that of the young group. However, the elderly participants showed a proportional increase over the young participants in response execution latency (MT). Further, the elderly group had a …