TY - JOUR
T1 - Age-related changes in electrophysiological and neuropsychological indices of working memory, attention control, and cognitive flexibility
AU - Peltz, Carrie Brumback
AU - Gratton, Gabriele
AU - Fabiani, Monica
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - Older adults exhibit great variability in their cognitive abilities, with some maintaining high levels of performance on executive control tasks and others showing significant deficits. Previous event-related potential (ERP) work has shown that some of these performance differences are correlated with persistence of the novelty/frontal P3 in older adults elicited by task-relevant events, presumably reflecting variability in the capacity to suppress orienting to unexpected but no longer novel events. In recent ERP work in young adults, we showed that the operation-span (OSPAN) task (a measure of attention control) is predictive of the ability of individuals to keep track of stimulus sequencing and to maintain running mental representations of task stimuli, as indexed by the parietally distributed P300 (or P3b). Both of these phenomena reflect aspects of frontal function (cognitive flexibility and attention control, respectively). To investigate these phenomena we sorted both younger and older adults into lowand high-working memory spans and lowand high-cognitive flexibility subgroups, and examined ERPs during an equal-probability choice reaction time task. For both age groups (a) participants with high OSPAN scores were better able to keep track of stimulus sequencing, as indicated by their smaller P3b to sequential changes; and (b) participants with lower cognitive flexibility had larger P3a than their high-scoring counterparts. However, these two phenomena did not interact suggesting that they manifest dissociable control mechanisms. Further, the fact that both effects are already visible in younger adults suggests that at least some of the brain mechanisms underlying individual differences in cognitive aging may already operate early in life.
AB - Older adults exhibit great variability in their cognitive abilities, with some maintaining high levels of performance on executive control tasks and others showing significant deficits. Previous event-related potential (ERP) work has shown that some of these performance differences are correlated with persistence of the novelty/frontal P3 in older adults elicited by task-relevant events, presumably reflecting variability in the capacity to suppress orienting to unexpected but no longer novel events. In recent ERP work in young adults, we showed that the operation-span (OSPAN) task (a measure of attention control) is predictive of the ability of individuals to keep track of stimulus sequencing and to maintain running mental representations of task stimuli, as indexed by the parietally distributed P300 (or P3b). Both of these phenomena reflect aspects of frontal function (cognitive flexibility and attention control, respectively). To investigate these phenomena we sorted both younger and older adults into lowand high-working memory spans and lowand high-cognitive flexibility subgroups, and examined ERPs during an equal-probability choice reaction time task. For both age groups (a) participants with high OSPAN scores were better able to keep track of stimulus sequencing, as indicated by their smaller P3b to sequential changes; and (b) participants with lower cognitive flexibility had larger P3a than their high-scoring counterparts. However, these two phenomena did not interact suggesting that they manifest dissociable control mechanisms. Further, the fact that both effects are already visible in younger adults suggests that at least some of the brain mechanisms underlying individual differences in cognitive aging may already operate early in life.
KW - Aging
KW - Cognitive flexibility
KW - Event related brain potentials
KW - Fluid intelligence
KW - Operation-span task
KW - P300
KW - Working memory
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UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84861454804&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00190
DO - 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00190
M3 - Article
C2 - 21887150
AN - SCOPUS:84861454804
SN - 1664-1078
VL - 2
JO - Frontiers in Psychology
JF - Frontiers in Psychology
IS - AUG
M1 - Article 190
ER -