David Balota

BACKGROUND/AIMS: Age-related cognitive decline is a pervasive problem in our aging population. To date, no pharmacological treatments to halt or reverse cognitive decline are available. Behavioral interventions, such as physical exercise and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, may reduce or reverse cognitive decline, but rigorously designed randomized controlled trials are needed to test the efficacy of such interventions. METHODS: Here, we describe the design of the Mindfulness, Education, and Exercise study, an 18-month randomized controlled trial that will assess the effect of two interventions-mindfulness training plus moderate-to-vigorous intensity exercise or moderate-to-vigorous intensity exercise alone-compared with a health education control group on cognitive function in older adults...

Introduction: Changes in personality characteristics are associated with the onset of symptoms in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and may even precede clinical diagnosis. However, personality changes caused by disease progression can be difficult to separate from changes that occur with normal aging. The Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network (DIAN) provides a unique cohort in which to relate measures of personality traits to in vivo markers of disease in a much younger sample than in typical late onset AD...

Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies report that moment-to-moment variability in the BOLD signal is related to differences in age and cognition and, thus, may be sensitive to age-dependent decline. However, head motion and/or cardiovascular health (CVH) may contaminate these relationships. We evaluated relationships between resting-state BOLD variability, age, and cognition, after characterizing and controlling for motion-related and cardiovascular influences, including pulse, blood pressure, BMI, and white matter hyperintensities (WMH), in a large (N = 422) resting-state fMRI sample of cognitively normal individuals (age 43-89)...

BACKGROUND: Cerebrospinal fluid tau and neurofilament light (NfL) are two biomarkers of neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's disease. Previous reports have shown that the influence of tau on cognitive decline depends on levels of amyloid burden whereas NfL predicts decline independently of amyloid. Most studies use a global cognitive composite as the primary outcome, and it is unknown if critical cognitive domain scores are similarly sensitive to rates of decline due to neurodegeneration...

The phenomenological experience of lexical retrieval often involves repeated, active attempts to retrieve phonologically and/or semantically related information. However, the influence of these multiple retrieval attempts on subsequent lexical retrieval is presently unknown. We investigated the influence of passively viewing or actively retrieving different types of information at the critical moment preceding lexical retrieval through a novel priming paradigm. Participants attempted to retrieve target words (e...

OBJECTIVES: The present study explored relationships among personality, Alzheimer's disease (AD) biomarkers, and dementia by addressing the following questions: (1) Does personality discriminate healthy aging and earliest detectable stage of AD? (2) Does personality predict conversion from healthy aging to early-stage AD? (3) Do AD biomarkers mediate any observed relationships between personality and dementia status/conversion? METHODS: Both self- and informant ratings of personality were obtained in a large well-characterized longitudinal sample of cognitively normal older adults (N = 436) and individuals with early-stage dementia (N = 74)...

We examined 3 different network models of representing semantic knowledge (5,018-word directed and undirected step distance networks, and an association-correlation network) to predict lexical priming effects. In Experiment 1, participants made semantic relatedness judgments for word pairs with varying path lengths. Response latencies for judgments followed a quadratic relationship with network path lengths, replicating and extending a recent pattern reported by Kenett, Levi, Anaki, and Faust (2017) for an 800-word association-correlation network in Hebrew...

Personality traits such as Neuroticism and Conscientiousness are associated with Alzheimer disease (AD) pathophysiology in cognitively normal (CN) and impaired individuals, and may represent potential risk or resilience factors, respectively. This study examined the cross-sectional relationship between personality traits and regional tau deposition using positron emission tomography (PET) in cognitively normal older adults. A cohort of CN (Clinical Dementia Rating (CDR) 0, n = 128) older adults completed the NEO Five-Factor Inventory to assess traits of Neuroticism, Extroversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness and underwent tau-PET and β-amyloid (Aβ)-PET imaging...

There is a growing interest in assessing how cognitive processes fluidly adjust across trials within a task. Dynamic adjustments of control are typically measured using the congruency sequence effect (CSE), which refers to the reduction in interference following an incongruent trial, relative to a congruent trial. However, it is unclear if this effect stems from a general control mechanism or a distinct process tied to cross-trial reengagement of the task set. We examine the relationship of the CSE with another measure of control referred to as the item-specific proportion congruency effect (ISPC), the finding that frequently occurring congruent items exhibit greater interference than items that are often incongruent...

Ratings of body-object interaction (BOI) measure the ease with which the human body can interact with a word's referent. Researchers have studied the effects of BOI in order to investigate the relationships between sensorimotor and cognitive processes. Such efforts could be improved, however, by the availability of more extensive BOI norms. In the present work, we collected BOI ratings for over 9,000 words. These new norms show good reliability and validity and have extensive overlap with the words used both in other lexical and semantic norms and in the available behavioral megastudies (e...

Dual-process models of episodic retrieval reveal consistent deficits of controlled recollection in aging and Alzheimer disease (AD). In contrast, automatic familiarity is relatively spared. We extend standard dual-process models by showing the importance of a third capture process. Capture produces a failure to attempt recollection, which might reflect a distinct error from an inability to recollect when attempted (Jacoby et al. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134(2), 131-148, 2005a). We used multinomial process tree (MPT) modeling to estimate controlled recollection and capture processes, as well as automatic retrieval processes, in a large group of middle-aged to older adults who were cognitively normal (N = 519) or diagnosed with the earliest detectable stage of AD (N = 107)...

Recently, we have shown that two types of initial testing (recall of a list or guessing of critical items repeated over 12 study/test cycles) improved final recognition of related and unrelated word lists relative to restudy. These benefits were eliminated, however, when test instructions were manipulated within subjects and presented after study of each list, procedures designed to minimise expectancy of a specific type of upcoming test [Huff, Balota, & Hutchison, 2016. The costs and benefits of testing and guessing on recognition memory...

Utilizing [18F]-AV-1451 tau positron emission tomography (PET) as an Alzheimer disease (AD) biomarker will require identification of brain regions that are most important in detecting elevated tau pathology in preclinical AD. Here, we utilized an unsupervised learning, data-driven approach to identify brain regions whose tau PET is most informative in discriminating low and high levels of [18F]-AV-1451 binding. 84 cognitively normal participants who had undergone AV-1451 PET imaging were used in a sparse k-means clustering with resampling analysis to identify the regions most informative in dividing a cognitively normal population into high tau and low tau groups...

OBJECTIVE: The frequency of mind-wandering (MW) decreases as a function of age in healthy individuals. One possible explanation is that MW is a resource-dependent process, and cognitive resources decline with age. The present study provides the first investigation of MW in the earliest stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD) to further examine the resource model and discontinuities between healthy aging and AD. METHOD: Three large cohorts completed the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART): a healthy middle-aged group (mean age = 61...

OBJECTIVE: Recollection and familiarity are independent processes that contribute to memory performance. Recollection is dependent on attentional control, which has been shown to be disrupted in early stage Alzheimer's disease (AD), whereas familiarity is independent of attention. The present longitudinal study examines the sensitivity of recollection estimates based on Jacoby's (1991) process dissociation procedure to AD-related biomarkers in a large sample of well-characterized cognitively normal middle-aged and older adults (N = 519) and the extent to which recollection discriminates these individuals from individuals with very mild symptomatic AD (N = 64)...

In standard attentional control tasks, interference effects are reduced following incongruent trials compared to congruent trials, a phenomenon known as the congruency sequence effect (CSE). Typical explanations of this effect suggest the CSE is due to changes in levels of control across adjacent trials. This interpretation has been questioned by the finding that older adults, individuals with impaired attentional control systems, have been shown to produce larger CSEs in the Stroop task compared with younger adult controls...

A prominent question in visual word recognition is whether letters within a word are processed in parallel or in a left to right sequence. Although most contemporary models posit parallel processing, this notion seems at odds with well-established serial position effects in word identification that indicate preferential processing for the initial letter. The present study reports 4 experiments designed to further probe the locus of the first position processing advantage. The paradigm involved masked target words presented for short durations and required participants to subsequently select from 2 alternatives, 1 which was identical to the target and 1 that differed by a single letter...

Longevity is in part (25%) inherited, and genetic studies aim to uncover allelic variants that play an important role in prolonging life span. Results to date confirm only a few gene variants associated with longevity, while others show inconsistent results. However, GWAS studies concentrate on single nucleotide polymorphisms, and there are only a handful of studies investigating variable number of tandem repeat variations related to longevity. Recently, Grady and colleagues (2013) reported a remarkable (66%) accumulation of those carrying the 7 repeat allele of the dopamine D4 receptor gene in a large population of 90-109 years old Californian centenarians, as compared to an ancestry-matched young population...

There has been growing interest in dynamic changes in the lexical processing system across trials, which have typically been assessed via linear mixed effect modelling. In the current study, we explore the influence of previous trial lexicality and previous trial perceptual degradation on the effect of lexicality and degradation on the current trial. The results of analyses of three datasets (two previously published studies and a new study) provide evidence for a robust four-way interaction among previous trial lexicality and degradation and current trial lexicality and degradation effects...

The current study examines visual word recognition in a large sample (N = 148) across the adult life span and across a large set of stimuli (N = 1,187) in three different lexical processing tasks (pronunciation, lexical decision, and animacy judgment). Although the focus of the present study is on the influence of word frequency, a diverse set of other variables are examined as the word recognition system ages and acquires more experience with language. Computational models and conceptual theories of visual word recognition and aging make differing predictions for age-related changes in the system...