The Integration of Emotion and Cognitive Control in the Aging Brain

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Cognitive control (i.e., goal-directed cognitive and behavioural regulation), a crucial ability for everyday life, tends to decline with age. On the other hand, emotional functioning has been shown to be preserved or even enhanced in older adults. Although age-associated deficits in cognitive control and maintenance in emotional functioning have been well-documented separately in the literature, little is known about how the two processes could be integrated to jointly affect age differences in cognition. Along with the rapidly emerging research interest in emotion-cognition integration (e.g., Pessoa, 2008), the proposed research takes a novel approach to identify behavioural indexes and neural mechanisms associated with age differences in cognitive control in the face of emotion. Specifically, we address questions of whether and how older adults’ enhanced emotional processing interacts with their declines in cognitive control. These questions will be addressed in four well-designed behavioural experiments and one EEG study. To assess the effect of emotion, we will manipulate emotional processing by introducing emotional stimuli (Experiment 1) or motivating emotional regulation through mood inductions (Experiment 2) with young and older adults performing the cognitive control AX-CPT task (AX version of the Continuous Performance Test). In this task, participants respond “target” to a probe “X” only if it follows a cue “A”, and respond “non-target” to any other combinations (i.e., AY, BX, or BY). Furthermore, we intend to examine the moderating effect of cue-probe delay (Experiment 3) and the frequency of interference trials (e.g., BX or AY trials; Experiment 4) in the effect of emotion on cognitive control in both age groups. Finally, to assess the neural correlates, electroencephalography (EEG) will be used to collect Event-Related-Potential (ERP) responses of young and older adults to the cue and probe in the AX-CPT task (Experiment 5). The proposed work will make novel theoretical and methodological contributions to cognitive aging research. Given the critical role of cognitive control in daily activities, the findings are expected to have some insightful practical implications in such applied domains as cognitive training and education involving older adults, a population that is rapidly growing across the world.