Effects of Age on the Cognitive ERPD/Cardiac Wave Effect

正常的衰老会导致各种认知领域的衰退，包括执行控制和记忆 这些流程对于成功执行许多日常任务至关重要。这些下降是因为 不同人群的下降率不一致表明下降率可能是可变的。因此，识别 使一些老年人能够保持他们的认知功能的因素是认知老化的重要目标 research.血液动力学证据表明，一些老年人可能能够通过以下方式应对下降： “补偿”，即，招募年轻人不使用的大脑区域和可能的心理过程。 然而，补偿假说经常被援引的一个事后的基础上，因此，模糊的， 哪些人需要补偿，哪些条件和任务会引起补偿， 参与的过程。因此，为了更好地理解个体差异，我们使用 认知储备假说，该假说认为储备因素（由智力等代理指标衡量） 社会地位、智商和社会经济地位）可能使一些老年人能够承受有害影响， 认知能力下降的几率更大因此，我们将赔偿问题纳入 更大的认知储备领域。因此，拟议的研究侧重于提供以下方面的补充资料： 无论是下降的个体差异的原因和认知过程的性质招募时， 进行补偿活动。认知储备的作用将通过将年轻人和 老年人的储备因子低或高（即，智商和社会经济地位），并根据他们的情节 内存性能（低，高）。这将有助于确定认知储备的个体差异是否 更好地解释补偿活动比任务表现的个体差异。提供资料 关于补偿性大脑活动的特定认知过程的性质，认知需求， 可能导致个人在高水平上进行补偿的变量将被参数化地操纵。此外，本发明还 在任务执行期间记录事件相关电位，应该提供有关这些事件的性质的时间信息 补偿过程，并揭示有关阶段的重要信息，他们帮助任务相关的 流程.具体地说，一个主要目的是测试一系列假设，即补偿性大脑活动， 记忆的形成和提取代表了认知控制过程的招募，推测是由 前额叶皮层，并使其在线以对抗与年龄相关的大脑功能衰退。ERP和 性能数据将从年轻人（20-30岁）、中年人（60-70岁）和老年人（71-85岁）中获得， 帮助确定与年龄相关的衰退轨迹。通过改变每一个人所需的认知控制水平， 五个提出的情景记忆任务，因此，需要增加认知控制过程，我们 将能够确定我们的老年人样本中哪些类型的个体可能产生 补偿性大脑活动以及这种补偿将发生的情况。

Normal aging results in declines in a variety of cognitive domains, including executive-control and mnemonic processes, which are critical for successfully performing many everyday tasks. The fact that these declines are not uniform across persons suggests that the rate of decline is potentially alterable. Therefore, identifying the factors that enable some elders to preserve their cognitive function is an important goal of cognitive aging research. Hemodynamic evidence suggests that some aging individuals may be able to deal with declines by "compensating," i.e., recruiting brain regions and presumably mental processes not used by young adults. However, the compensation hypothesis is frequently invoked on a post hoc basis and is, therefore, vague in terms of which persons need to compensate, which conditions and tasks elicit compensation and the nature of the processes that are engaged. Therefore, to enable a better understanding of individual differences, we use the Cognitive Reserve hypothesis, which posits that reserve factors (measured by proxies such as intellectual status, IQ, and socio-economic status, SES) may enable some older adults to withstand the deleterious effects of cognitive decline more successfully than others. Hence, we embed the issue of compensation within the larger domain of cognitive reserve. Thus, the proposed studies focus on providing additional information on both the reason for individual differences in decline and the nature of the cognitive processes recruited when compensatory activity is engaged. The role of cognitive reserve will be assessed by categorizing young and older adults as either low or high on reserve factors (i.e., IQ and SES) and on the basis of their episodic memory performance (low, high). This will help determine whether individual differences in cognitive reserve account better for compensatory activity than individual differences in task performance. To provide information on the nature of the specific cognitive processes underlying compensatory brain activity, cognitive demand, a variable that might lead individuals to compensate at high levels, will be parametrically manipulated. Further, the recording of ERPs during task performance should provide timing information about the nature of these compensatory processes and reveal important information about the stages at which they aid task-related processes. Specifically, a major aim is to test a series of hypotheses that compensatory brain activity during memory formation and retrieval represents recruitment of cognitive-control processes, presumably mediated by the prefrontal cortex, and brought on line to counter age-related decline in brain function. ERP and performance data will be obtained from young (20-30), young-old (60-70) and old-old (71-85) adults, which will help determine the trajectory of age-related declines. By varying the level of cognitive control required in each of five proposed episodic memory tasks and, thereby, the need to increment cognitive-control processes, we will be able to determine which types of individuals within our older-adult samples are likely to produce compensatory brain activity and the circumstances under which such compensation will occur.