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Given the success of the previous edition of this Research Topic, we are pleased to announce the release of its second volume. Age-related changes can concurrently affect cognitive, motor, and sensory functioning and their interactions. For instance, age-related unisensory impairments have been linked to slower gait, functional mobility decline, increased risks of falls and reduced quality of life. Additionally, balance impairments have been associated with inefficient interactions between musculoskeletal and sensory systems which are often compromised in aging. Lastly, inefficient multisensory integration processes have been linked to increased falls, worse balance, slower gait, and increased cognitive impairments. Consequently, the successful interaction among sensory, motor and cognitive systems are an integral aspect for everyday life activities, which commonly deteriorate with age.
Recently, studies on aging processes and age-related changes in behavior have been expanding considerably, probably due to the dramatic changes observed in the demographics. This increase in the overall age and proportion of elderly people has heightened the severity of problems associated with the safety and well-being of elderly persons in everyday life. Many researchers working on motor control have thus focused more intensely on the effects of age on motor control. This new avenue of research has led to programs for alleviating or delaying the specific sensory-motor limitations encountered by the elderly (e.g. falls) in an attempt to make the elderly more autonomous.The aggregation of studies from different perspectives is often fascinating, especially when the same field can serve as a common ground between researchers. Nearly all contributors to this book work on sensory-motor aging; they represent a large range of affiliations and backgrounds including psychology, neurobiology, cognitive sciences, kinesiology, neuropsychology, neuropharmacology, motor performance, physical therapy, exercise science, and human development. Addressing age-related behavioral changes can also furnish some crucial reflections in the debate about motor coordination: aging is the product of both maturational and environmental processes, and studies on aging must determine how the intricate interrelationships between these processes evolve. The study of aging makes it possible to determine how compensatory mechanisms, operating on different subsystems and each aging at its own rate, compensate for biological degenerations and changing external demands. This volume will contribute to demonstrating that the study of the aging process raises important theoretical questions.
This second edition of the popular Cognitive Neuroscience of Aging provides up-to-date coverage of the most fundamental topics in this discipline. Like the first edition, this volume accessibly and comprehensively reviews the neural mechanisms of cognitive aging appropriate to both professionals and students in a variety of domains, including psychology, neuroscience, neuropsychology, neurology, and psychiatry. The chapters are organized into three sections. The first section focuses on major questions regarding methodological approaches and experimental design. It includes chapters on structural imaging (MRI, DTI), functional imaging (fMRI), and molecular imaging (dopamine PET, etc), and covers multimodal imaging, longitudinal studies, and the interpretation of imaging findings. The second section concentrates on specific cognitive abilities, including attention and inhibitory control, executive functions, memory, and emotion. The third section turns to domains with health and clinical implications, such as the emergence of cognitive deficits in middle age, the role of genetics, the effects of modulatory variables (hypertension, exercise, cognitive engagement), and the distinction between healthy aging and the effects of dementia and depression. Taken together, the chapters in this volume, written by many of the most eminent scientists as well as young stars in this discipline, provide a unified and comprehensive overview of cognitive neuroscience of aging.
For most Americans, staying "mentally sharp" as they age is a very high priority. Declines in memory and decision-making abilities may trigger fears of Alzheimer's disease or other neurodegenerative diseases. However, cognitive aging is a natural process that can have both positive and negative effects on cognitive function in older adults - effects that vary widely among individuals. At this point in time, when the older population is rapidly growing in the United States and across the globe, it is important to examine what is known about cognitive aging and to identify and promote actions that individuals, organizations, communities, and society can take to help older adults maintain and improve their cognitive health. Cognitive Aging assesses the public health dimensions of cognitive aging with an emphasis on definitions and terminology, epidemiology and surveillance, prevention and intervention, education of health professionals, and public awareness and education. This report makes specific recommendations for individuals to reduce the risks of cognitive decline with aging. Aging is inevitable, but there are actions that can be taken by individuals, families, communities, and society that may help to prevent or ameliorate the impact of aging on the brain, understand more about its impact, and help older adults live more fully and independent lives. Cognitive aging is not just an individual or a family or a health care system challenge. It is an issue that affects the fabric of society and requires actions by many and varied stakeholders. Cognitive Aging offers clear steps that individuals, families, communities, health care providers and systems, financial organizations, community groups, public health agencies, and others can take to promote cognitive health and to help older adults live fuller and more independent lives. Ultimately, this report calls for a societal commitment to cognitive aging as a public health issue that requires prompt action across many sectors.
Old adults undertake multiple reduced cognitive abilities in aging, which are accompanied with specific brain reorganization in forms of regional brain activity and brain tissues, inter-region connectivity, and topology of whole brain networks in both function and structure. The plasticity changes of brain activities in old adults are explained by the mechanisms of compensation and dedifferentiation. For example, older adults have been observed to have greater, usually bilateral, prefrontal activities during memory tasks compared to the typical unilateral prefrontal activities in younger adults, which was explained as a compensation for the reduced brain activities in visual processing cortices. Dedifferentiation is another mechanism to explain that old adults are with much less selective and less distinct activity in task-relevant brain regions compared with younger adults. A larger number of studies have examined the plasticity changes of brain from the perspective of regional brain activities. However, studies on only regional brain activities cannot fully elucidate the neural mechanisms of reduced cognitive abilities in aging, as multiple regions are integrated together to achieve advanced cognitive function in human brain. In recent years, brain connectivity/network, which targets how brain regions are integrated, have drawn increasing attention in neuroscience with the development of neuroimaging techniques and graph theoretical analysis. Connectivity quantifies functional association or neural fibers between two regions that may be spatially far separated, and graph theoretical analysis of brain network examines the complex interactions among multiple regions from the perspective of topology. Studies showed that compared to younger adults, older adults had altered strength of task-relevant functional connectivity between specific brain regions in cognitive tasks, and the alternation of connectivity are correlated to behavior performance. For example, older adults had weaker functional connectivity between the premotor cortex and a region in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in a working memory task. Interventions like cognitive training and neuro-modulation (e.g., transcranial magnetic stimulation) have been shown to be promising in regaining or retaining the decreasing cognitive abilities in aging. However, only few neuroimaging studies have examined the influence of interventions to old adult’s brain activity, connectivity, and cognitive performance. This Research Topic calls for contributions on brain network of subjects in normal aging or with age-related diseases like mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease. The studies are expected to be based on neuroimaging techniques including but not limited to functional magnetic resonance imaging, Electroencephalography, and diffusion tensor imaging, and contributions on the influence of interventions to brain networks in aging are highly encouraged. All these studies would enrich our understanding of neural mechanisms underlying aging, and offer new insights for developing possible interventions to retain cognitive abilities in aging subjects.
As our society ages, the topic of cognitive aging is becoming increasingly important. This volume provides an accessible overview of how the cognitive system changes as a function of normal aging. Building on the successful first edition, this volume provide an even more comprehensive coverage of the major issues affecting memory, attention, language, speech and other aspects of cognitive functioning. The essential chapters from the first edition have been thoroughly revised and updated and new chapters have been introduced which draw in neuroscience studies and more applied topics. In addition, contributors were encouraged to ensure their chapters are accessible to students studying the topic for the first time. This therefore makes the volume appealing as a textbook on senior undergraduate and graduate courses.
As the proportion of older adults continues to grow rapidly here in the U.S. and across the globe, aging adults may be required to make increasingly more independent health-related and financial decisions. Thus, it is increasingly imperative to better understand the impact of age-related psychological changes on decision making. Although a growing body of research has linked age-related deficits in attention, memory, and cognitive control to changes in medial temporal and lateral prefrontal cortical function, remarkably little research has investigated the influence of aging on valuation and associated mesolimbic function in the striatum and medial prefrontal cortex. Likewise, theoretical accounts link age-related declines in a number of basic cognitive abilities to dopamine function, but research has largely neglected age differences in value-based learning and decision making which also rely on the dopamine system. Recent findings reveal age-related declines in the structure of striatal and medial frontal circuits, however it was not previously clear whether these structural declines contribute to functional deficits in incentive processing. Thus, the seven experiments presented here explored potential age differences across a range of value-based tasks from basic anticipatory and consummatory responses to reward cues (Experiments 1--2) to probabilistic value-based learning (Experiments 2--5) to investment decision making (Experiments 6--7). The studies focus on both age-related and non-age-related individual differences in learning and decision making across the adult life span. Overall, three sets of key findings emerge. The first set of experiments on anticipatory affect reveal evidence for an age-related asymmetry in the anticipation of monetary gains and losses, such that older adults appear less sensitive to the prospect of financial loss than younger adults. In a subset of adults, this anticipatory affective bias contributes to loss avoidance learning impairments through the sensitivity of the anterior insula. Thus, although a relative lack of anxiety about potential loss may contribute to increased well-being, this asymmetry may put individuals with blunted loss anticipation at risk for certain types of financial mistakes. In fact, we show that individuals who perform poorly on the laboratory-based loss avoidance learning task accrue more financial debt in the real world. The second set of experiments focus on age differences in value-based learning and reveal that although older adults show intact neural representation of the actual value of reward outcomes, there is an age-related decline in the neural representation of prediction error at outcome in the striatum and medial prefrontal cortex. Age differences in learning are magnified when choice set size is increased, but when the number of trials is extended older adults reach the same performance criterion as younger adults. The third set of experiments focus on age differences in risky financial decision making and reveal that older adults make more suboptimal choices than younger adults when choosing risky assets. Neuroimaging analyses reveal that the representation of expected value in the nucleus accumbens and medial prefrontal cortex is correlated with optimal investment decisions, and that the age-related increase in risky investment mistakes is mediated by a novel neural measure of variability in nucleus accumbens activity. The presentation of value information through visual decision aids improves investment choices in both younger and older adults. These findings are consistent with the notion that mesolimbic circuits play a critical role in optimal choice, and imply that providing simplified information about expected value may improve financial risk taking across the adult life span. Across the experiments, the findings suggest that both age-related affective biases and probabilistic learning impairments can influence decision making both in the laboratory and in the real world through insular and mesolimbic brain regions. Importantly, age-related impairments are reduced under supportive task conditions (designed to target the brain systems identified using neuroimaging). Together, the set of experiments presented here suggests that understanding how the brain processes value information may eventually inform the design of more targeted and effective behavioral interventions for investors of all ages.
Human Kinetics' Aging, Exercise, and Cognition series presents advanced research and key issues for understanding and researching the links between exercise, aging, and cognition. The three volumes in this series are essential references for cognitive gerontologists, medical and health science researchers, exercise science researchers and professionals, and public health administrators interested in scientific evidence demonstrating the beneficial effects of regular physical activity on cognitive functioning and general health during aging. In Active Living, Cognitive Functioning, and Aging, internationally known experts present state-of-the-art findings related to exercise and cognitive functioning of older adults. The book's review of research on pertinent issues in measurement and physiological mechanisms will raise consciousness among researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and the public about the beneficial effects of an active lifestyle on the mind during the aging process. Exercise and Its Mediating Effects on Cognitionshows that although many factors contribute to a healthy mind, an active lifestyle provides positive contributions to the cognitive functioning of the aging brain. The text examines how physical activity can indirectly affect cognitive function by influencing mediators--such as sleep quality, nutrition, disease states, anxiety, and depression--that affect physical and mental resources for cognition. This volume also identifies and studies key sources of individual variations in exercise and cognitive processes. Enhancing Cognitive Functioning and Brain Plasticityoffers a synergistic view of the complex role of exercise, physical activity, and intellectual stimulation in the cognitive and brain functioning of older adults.The text examines exercise and nonexercise interventions shown to influence cognition and brain plasticity in elderly humans and older animals, and it explains how state-of-the-art neuroimaging measures are used in the study of individual differences in cognition and brain functioning.