Effects of Age on the Cognitive ERPD/Cardiac Wave Effect

正常衰老会导致包括执行控制和助记在内的各种认知领域的衰退 流程，这是成功执行许多日常任务的关键。事实上，这些下降是 不同人之间的不一致表明，下降的速度可能是可变的。因此，确定 使一些老年人能够保持其认知功能的因素是认知老化的一个重要目标 研究。血液动力学证据表明，一些上了年纪的人可能能够通过 “补偿”，即招募年轻人没有使用的大脑区域和可能的心理过程。 然而，补偿假设经常是在事后援引的，因此在 哪些人需要赔偿，哪些条件和任务需要赔偿，以及 正在进行的进程。因此，为了更好地了解个体差异，我们使用 认知储备假说，该假说假设储备因素(由智力等代理人衡量 地位、智商和社会经济地位)可能会使一些老年人能够承受有害的影响 比其他人更成功的认知衰退。因此，我们将补偿问题嵌入到 更大的认知储备域。因此，拟议的研究侧重于提供关于以下方面的补充资料 无论是个体差异下降的原因还是认知过程的性质 补偿性活动正在进行。认知储备的作用将通过对年轻人和 老年人在储备因素(即智商和社会经济地位)上或低或高，并根据他们的发作 内存性能(低、高)。这将有助于确定认知储备的个体差异 更好地解释补偿活动，而不是个人在任务表现上的差异。提供信息 关于代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进行补偿的变量，将被参数操纵。此外， 任务执行期间事件相关事件的记录应提供有关这些事件性质的时间信息 补偿过程，并揭示有关它们帮助任务相关阶段的重要信息 流程。具体地说，一个主要目的是测试一系列假说，即代偿性大脑活动在 记忆形成和提取代表了认知控制过程的招募，推测是由 前额叶皮质，并上线以对抗与年龄相关的大脑功能下降。企业资源计划和 性能数据将从年轻人(20-30岁)、年轻人(60-70岁)和老年人(71-85岁)获得，这将 帮助确定与年龄相关的下降的轨迹。通过改变每个人所需的认知控制水平 在五个被提议的情节记忆任务中，因此，我们需要增加认知控制过程 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 代偿性大脑活动以及在什么情况下会发生这种补偿。

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.