2006 Grant Recipients


Faculty Grants

Ying-Yi Hong, PI
The "Bizarre" Project

The main goal of the present research is to show how cultural experiences could affect participants' processing of natural versus not natural object and background visual images. Specifically, Goh et al. (in press) have shown that Chinese elderly participants showed significantly less adaptation responses in the object areas than did American elderly participants. These findings suggested that the Chinese elderly participants have difficulty with simultaneous processing of objects and backgrounds, and thus directed more attention to backgrounds than to objects (Chee et al., 2006). These cross-cultural differences, however, were not shown between young Chinese and American samples. Both groups showed similar adaptation levels in the object, background and object-background binding areas. Given that young people are not as limited as elderly in visual processing resources, simultaneous processing of objects and backgrounds may not have posed a challenge to both Chinese and American young samples. Moreover, the adaptation visual task used by Chee et al. and Goh et al. involved pairings of objects in naturalistic background, it may not be powerful enough to tap into the differences between the young Chinese and American samples in object processing. In fact, differences may exist as Gutchess et al. (in press) have found that (young) East Asians, relative to Americans, activated less object processing brain areas using an incidental encoding paradigm.

Given that Ji et al. have shown that Chinese college students were more likely than American college students to categorize objects based on their relations than properties, it is likely that young Chinese sample would pay more attention to the relational meaning between the objects and backgrounds than do their American counterparts. This should result in young Chinese participants showing significantly less adaptation responses to objects in the context of non-naturalistic backgrounds than do young American participants.

It is important to explore the pairings of objects in non-naturalistic (but possible) background (e.g., lion on a street, utensil in the sky) because it can isolate how the relational meaning may facilitate or interfere with the processing of object and background. This project is important in that (a) it potentially shows cross-cultural effects even between young Chinese and American samples, (b) it integrates the cross-cultural differences on object-background processing with relational categorization, and (c) it provides a possible neurological basis upon which we can examine the effects of acculturation, cultural priming, and individual differences.

Dan Morrow, PI
External Aids and Patient/Provider Collaboration

Our overall goal is to develop external aids that help providers and patients collaborate to create adherence plans for taking medication, so that patients are better prepared for self-care. The study investigates benefits of aids for collaborative problem-solving during a simulated patient/provider consultation. Older and younger adults are randomly assigned to be provider or patient and then work together to create schedules that satisfy medication and patient constraints. They either use a matrix aid, blank paper (to control for effects of any external support) or no aid (talk only) to create the schedules. External aids should make collaboration more effective and efficient, leading to accurate plans that are easily implemented. Findings should set the stage for testing the impact of the aids on provider/patient collaboration and on patient knowledge and self-care in clinical contexts.

Jacob Sosnoff
Variability of Cognitive Processing in Older Adults: The Role of Cardiovascular Fitness

It is well established that with advanced age there is a decrement in cognitive function that negatively impacts quality of life. Traditionally, this cognitive decrement has been indexed by mean performance on a variety of tasks. Recently, it has been demonstrated that the within individual variability (e.g. inconsistency) of performance is uniquely indicative of cognitive health. As such age-related alterations in mean cognitive performance and variation in cognitive performance are theorized to result from distinct neurobiological processes. Fortunately, the age-related decline in cognitive function is not inevitable, but can be mitigated by various interventions including physical activity training. Currently it is not known if physical activity can minimize older adult’s increase in cognitive variability. This proposal seeks to fill this knowledge gap by examining the relationship between cardiovascular fitness and age differences in cognitive variability across multiple timescales.

Post-Doc and Graduate Grants

Nicholas Cassavaugh
Driver Safety Training

The proposed research investigates the effects of cognitive and motor training on driving performance in older adults. Participants' baseline performance in driving tasks (vehicle control, visual-spatial attention and working memory) are assessed in a driving simulator. Eight days of cognitive training follow. Using variable-priority training and a custom computer program, participants receive training in manual tracking, working memory, visual attentional span and multiple-tasking. Subsequently, drivers' performance is again measured. It is expected that driver performance (as measured by vehicle control parameters and performance on the side tasks) will improve for those drivers in the training group as compared to the control group.

Kirk Erickson and Jennifer Kim
Aerobic Exercise and Neurocognitive Function in APOE Epsilon 4 Carriers

The projected explosion of people over 60 years of age has made the search for interventions that reduce or reverse age-related neurocognitive decline an imperative public health goal. Recent research has reported that aerobic exercise may be an effective intervention in reducing the risk of developing dementia or Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The genetic presence of the APOE epsilon 4 (e4) allele is now considered a major risk factor for developing AD. People who are homozygous for the e4 allele have a 50% chance of developing AD and have been shown to have lower scores on a variety of memory and attention tasks as early as middle-age (e.g. Greenwood et al., 2005). Thus far, only two studies have examined whether physical activity can reduce the risk of developing AD in carriers of the e4 allele. These two studies have reported contradictory results. One study reported that e4 carriers showed a reduced risk of cognitive decline with increased physical activity (Schuit et al. 2001) and the other that only ¬non-carriers of the e4 allele showed cognitive benefits of increased physical activity (Podewils et al. 2005). Both of these studies had serious limitations that could have contributed to the discrepant findings. Therefore, it remains an open question as to whether aerobic exercise will positively influence those who are at a genetic risk for developing AD. This proposal focuses on addressing the contradictory findings from these two prior studies by improving the methods of assessing physical fitness and cognitive functioning in APOE e4 carriers. The study proposed will examine the efficacy of aerobic exercise on the cognitive functioning of those people who are at a high risk for developing AD and cognitive decline – that is, those people who are e4 carriers.

Jeanine Parisi
Exploring Engagement in Adulthood: A Comprehensive Methodological Approach

With growing recognition of the importance of engagement on the physical and mental health of older adults, this research is intended to further the investigation of factors that maintain or increase cognitive performance though later adulthood. The proposed research will explore how people experience daily activities by using a novel methodological approach, the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM; Kahneman et al., 2004) which has heretofore not been used to understand age differences in activity. The application of this methodology to cognitive aging will allow me to test the hypothesis that it is not merely the quantity of activity that is predictive of cognitive performance, but rather the proportion of time spent in emotionally satisfying and intellectually stimulating experiences.

Elizabeth A. H. Wilson
Aging, Memory, and the Wording of Text

The proposed study attempts to assess the relationship between positive and negative wordings of written statements and subsequent memory of older and younger adults for the main ideas of these statements. There is evidence that declines in source memory occur with age while familiarity stays relatively stable throughout the lifespan. Because evidence also exists that older adults often possess a bias towards believing that familiar information is true, positively worded statements may be better remembered by older adults than their negative counterparts that possess detail words important to the basic meaning of the message. To test this possibility, in this study 64 participants (32 young and 32 older adults) will study a series of 48 statements containing medical information, half of which will be worded positively and half of which will be worded negatively. After completing a battery of cognitive tests, these subjects will then be tested on their remembrance for the main ideas of these statements through a series of 48 true or false questions pertaining to the main ideas of the 48 study items. At test, items may be shown in the exact same way as they were at test, or with changes to the wording with preserved meaning, semantic changes with relatively preserved wording, or changes to both the wording structure and meaning of the idea included in the statement. Memory for all types of items should be equivalent for both age groups unless source memory deficits and subsequent truth bias effects are seen in the older adults, in which case these participants may show decreased performance related to a preference for truth judgments of positively worded items and a forgetting of the inclusion of negative supporting words in negatively worded study statements.