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Aging

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Full-Text Articles in Experimental Analysis of Behavior

Age-Related Changes In Visual Spatial Performance, Samantha Farrell May 2017

Age-Related Changes In Visual Spatial Performance, Samantha Farrell

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Visual spatial skills allow individuals to understand the relationship between objects, people, and the environment for their everyday activities. Visual spatial abilities incorporate visual, motor, and cognitive components, each of which changes across the lifespan. The current study examined the effects of age-related changes and practice type on visual spatial performance. Participants between 40 and 79 years of age were asked to complete the Block Design Task (BDT) by using nine blocks to recreate various designs. Both accuracy and latency were measured to examine these changes. Task difficulty and practice type were varied and cognitive abilities were measured via MMSE …

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Effects Of Age, Task Type, And Information Load On Discrimination Learning, Morgan E. Brown Jul 2016

Effects Of Age, Task Type, And Information Load On Discrimination Learning, Morgan E. Brown

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

The feature positive effect (FPE) is a phenomenon in discrimination learning by which learning occurs more quickly when the presence (Feature positive; FP), rather than absence (Feature negative; FN) of a stimulus indicates a response should be made. Although the FPE has been extensively corroborated, a reversal, or feature negative effect (FNE), has been found when a target stimulus comes from a smaller set of stimuli (Fiedler, Eckert, & Poysiak, 1988). Age differences in FP and FN learning indicate that older adults perform more poorly than young adults on both FP and FN tasks, and are likely related to decline …

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Aging And Emotion Recognition: An Examination Of Stimulus And Attentional Mechanisms, Stephanie Nicole Sedall Jan 2016

Aging And Emotion Recognition: An Examination Of Stimulus And Attentional Mechanisms, Stephanie Nicole Sedall

ETD Archive

Emotion recognition is essential for interpersonal communication. However, previous research has suggested that older adults are not as accurate as younger adults in recognizing certain emotions, particularly negative facial expressions of anger, fear, and sadness. Including additional contextual information (e.g., manipulation of certain facial features) might help us better understand these age differences. The present study investigated how potential age differences in emotion recognition are influenced by stimulus factors (target eye gaze direction) as well as facial viewing patterns, cognitive functioning, and physiological processes. A sample of younger and older adults viewed static facial expressions depicting anger, fear, sadness, happiness, …

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Age Differences In The Impact Of Emotional Cues On Subsequent Target Detection, Brandon Wade Coffey Jul 2015

Age Differences In The Impact Of Emotional Cues On Subsequent Target Detection, Brandon Wade Coffey

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Emotional cues within the environment capture our attention and influence how we perceive our surroundings. Past research has shown that emotional cues presented before the detection of a perceptual gap can actually impair the perception of elementary visual features (e.g., the lack of detail creating a spatial gap) while simultaneously improving the perception of fast temporal features of vision (e.g., the rapid onset, offset, and re-emergence of a stimulus). This effect has been attributed to amygdalar enhancements of visual inputs conveying emotional features along magnocellular channels. The current study compared participants’ ability to detect spatial and temporal gaps in simple …

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Effects Of 17Β-Estradiol On Learning And Memory And Strategy Use During A Hole Board Spatial Navigation Task In Aged Male Rats, Megan Berthiaume Apr 2015

Effects Of 17Β-Estradiol On Learning And Memory And Strategy Use During A Hole Board Spatial Navigation Task In Aged Male Rats, Megan Berthiaume

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Treatment with 17β- estradiol has been shown to ameliorate age related deficits in spatial learning and memory as well as to promote the use of an allocentric strategy during spatial navigation. While the majority of research using 17β- estradiol has been done using females rodents, there have been studies showing an improvement in spatial learning and memory and promoted use of allocentric strategies in spatial navigation in males as well. In males testosterone (T) is metabolized into estradiol by aromatase. As circulating levels of T decline with aging there is less available T to be metabolized into estradiol. The current …

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Age Differences In Bimanual Coordination, Paul Amrhein, George Stelmach, Noreen Goggin Jan 1988

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 …

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