Lynn Hasher

Circadian rhythms are powerful timekeepers that drive physiological and intellectual functioning throughout the day. These rhythms vary across individuals, with morning chronotypes rising and peaking early in the day and evening chronotypes showing a later rise in arousal, with peaks in the afternoon or evening. Chronotype also varies with age from childhood to adolescence to old age. As a result of these differences, the time of day at which people are best at attending, learning, solving analytical problems, making complex decisions, and even behaving ethically varies...

BACKGROUND: Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), a prodromal phase of Alzheimer's disease (AD), is characterized by episodic memory dysfunction, but inhibitory deficits have also been commonly reported. Time of day (TOD) effects have been confirmed in 1) healthy aging on cognitive processes such as inhibitory control, and 2) on behavior in AD (termed the sundowning effect), but no such research has addressed aMCI. OBJECTIVE: The present study examined the impact of TOD on the behavioral and electrophysiological correlates of inhibition in 54 individuals with aMCI and 52 healthy controls (HCs), all of morning chronotype...

Healthy aging is accompanied by well-characterized shifts in memory systems: episodic memory tends to decline with age while semantic memory remains relatively intact, with some knowledge domains strengthening. Beyond reflecting on the past, these distinct memory systems often guide decisions about the future. Yet how such age-related memory shifts influence simple value-based choices remain understudied. Here, younger (18-24 years) and older (61-75 years) adults completed a card game in which they could use task-relevant episodic memories to maximize the number of points they earned...

The mere-exposure effect, in which repeated stimuli are liked more than novel stimuli, is a well-known effect. However, little research has studied adult age differences in mere-exposure effects, despite possible applications in helping older adults transition to new living environments. Here, we report four experiments assessing mere-exposure to neutral-face stimuli in groups of older and younger adult participants tested online. In each experiment, repeated face exposure did not increase liking within either age group; rather, Bayesian evidence favored the null hypothesis of no effect...

Time of day (TOD) influences on executive functions have been widely reported, with greater efficiency demonstrated at optimal relative to non-optimal TOD according to one's chronotype (i.e., synchrony effect). Older adults (OAs) show declines in inhibitory control and are more sensitive to the effects of circadian variation on executive functioning. To date, no studies have investigated the effects of TOD and aging on executive functioning using electrophysiological measures. The present study investigated the effects of aging and TOD on the neural correlates of inhibitory processing (N2 and P3) using event-related potentials (ERPs)...

Aging is associated with altered brain connectivity within the default mode network (DMN). Although research using functional magnetic resonance imaging has quantified age-related alterations in functional connectivity within this network during resting state, it is less clear how this may be reflected in electrophysiological measures, and how this relates to cognitive performance in older adults. The aim of this study was to quantify age differences in phase synchrony of the DMN during resting state, with particular focus on connectivity between the anterior node (i...

In humans, age-related declines in vision, hearing, and touch coincide with changes in amplitude and latency of sensory-evoked potentials. These age-related differences in neural activity may be related to a common deterioration of supra-modal brain areas (e.g., PFC) that mediate activity in sensory cortices or reflect specific sensorineural impairments that may differ between sensory modalities. To distinguish between these two possibilities, we measured neuroelectric brain activity while 37 young adults (18-30 years, 18 males) and 35 older adults (60-88 years, 20 males) were presented with a rapid randomized sequence of lateralized auditory, visual, and somatosensory stimuli...

Previous work has shown that older adults with typical age-related memory changes (i.e., without cognitive impairment) pick up irrelevant information implicitly, and unknowingly use that information when it becomes relevant to a later task. Here, we address the possibility that implicit processes play a similarly beneficial role in the cognitive abilities of individuals with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). Twenty-two individuals with aMCI and 22 matched controls participated in a picture judgment task while instructed to ignore distractions in the form of word/non-word letter strings...

Prior learning can hinder subsequent memory, especially when there is conflict between old and new information. The ability to handle this proactive interference is an important source of differences in memory performance between younger and older adults. In younger participants, Oberauer et al. (2017, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 43[1], 1) report evidence of proactive facilitation from previously learned information in a working memory task in the absence of proactive interference between long-term and working memory...

The electrophysiological evidence for suppression to date primarily draws upon traditional retrieval-induced forgetting and Think/No-Think paradigms, which involve strategic and intentional restriction of thought. Here event-related potential (ERP) signatures of suppression were examined using a novel task, which unlike traditional paradigms, does not include an initial priming step or intentional thought restraint. Participants were instructed to verbally generate semantically related responses to cue words (e...

OBJECTIVES: Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), a prodromal stage of Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, is characterized by episodic memory impairment. Recent evidence has shown inhibitory control deficits in aMCI, but the extent of these deficits across inhibitory domains (i.e., response inhibition and interference control) and aMCI subtypes (i.e., single vs multiple domain) remains unclear. Few studies have included reaction time intraindividual variability (RT IIV) in these efforts...

The efficacy of a technology-driven visual arts recreation activity, delivered virtually, was evaluated for its potential to achieve positive impacts, similar to traditional arts-interventions, on wellbeing in long-term care residents. Thirty-one residents (average age 86.8 years; SD = 9.4) engaged with the arts-intervention for 30-minutes, twice weekly, for 6 weeks with either a partner or as part of a group. Wellbeing indicators included self-reported psychological and health-related wellness, and attention capacity...

Reduced attentional control with age is associated with the processing and maintenance of task-irrelevant information in memory. Yet the nature of these memory representations remains unclear. We present evidence that, relative to younger adults ( n = 48), older adults ( n = 48) both (a) store simultaneously presented target and irrelevant information as rich, bound memory representations and (b) spontaneously reactivate irrelevant information when presented with previously associated targets. In a three-stage implicit reactivation paradigm, re-presenting a target picture that was previously paired with a distractor word spontaneously reactivated the previously associated word, making it become more accessible than an unreactivated distractor word in a subsequent implicit memory task...

Optimal performance in many tasks requires minimizing the impact of both visual distraction and mind-wandering. Yet, so far, these two types of distraction have been studied in isolation and it remains unclear whether they act in similar or dissociable ways across age groups. Here, we studied the impact of visual distraction and mind-wandering on performance in a go/no-go task in young and older adults. Older adults reported higher task focus than young, which was associated with a specific age-related reduction in mind-wandering, rather than to thoughts triggered by the task...

Inhibitory theory suggests that a major determinant of individual differences in cognitive performance (including differences that are typically observed with increasing age) is the ability to dampen down goal-irrelevant stimuli, thoughts, and actions. While this theory has garnered a lot of support over the years, it has also seen several challenges. This special issue of Psychology and Aging entitled "Aging and Inhibition: The View Ahead" continues with this theme and includes 14 articles by top researchers in the field of cognitive aging...

Goal-relevant information can be maintained in working memory over a brief delay interval to guide an upcoming decision. There is also evidence suggesting the existence of a complementary process: namely, the ability to suppress information that is no longer relevant to ongoing task goals. Moreover, this ability to suppress or inhibit irrelevant information appears to decline with age. In this study, we compared younger and older adults undergoing fMRI on a working memory task designed to address whether the modulation of neural representations of relevant and no-longer-relevant items during a delay interval is related to age and overall task performance...

OBJECTIVE: Forgetting names is a common memory concern for people with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) and is related to explicit memory deficits and pathological changes in the medial temporal lobes at the early stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD). In the current experiment, we tested a unique method to improve memory for face-name associations in people with aMCI involving incidental rehearsal of face-name pairs. METHOD: Older adults with aMCI and age- and education-matched controls learned 24 face-name pairs and were tested via immediate cued recall with faces as cues for associated names...

Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) is a prodromal stage of Alzheimer's disease that is characterized by impairments in episodic memory. Recent evidence has shown that inhibitory control is also impaired in aMCI. The aim of the present meta-analysis was to quantify inhibitory control ability in individuals with aMCI by examining performance across a range of well-defined inhibition paradigms that tapped into one of three inhibitory control subtypes (i) interference control (e.g., Stroop task), (ii) response inhibition (e...

Evidence suggests that age differences in associative memory are attenuated for associations that are consistent with prior knowledge. Such knowledge structures have traditionally been associated with the default network (DN), which also shows reduced modulation with age. In the present study, we investigated whether DN activity and connectivity patterns could account for this age-related effect. Younger and older adults underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging as they learned realistic and unrealistic prices of common grocery items...

It has been shown in literature that East Asians are more inclined to process context information than individuals in Western cultures. Using a context memory task that requires studying object images in social contexts (i.e., rating objects in an imagined social or experiential scenario), our recent study revealed an age-invariant advantage for Chinese young and older participants compared to their Canadian counterparts in memory for encoding contexts. To examine whether this cultural difference also occurred during encoding, this follow-up report analyzed encoding performance and its relationship to subsequent memory based on the same data from the same task of the same sample...