Charitable and memorable? Probing the effects of prosocial decisions on face memory in younger and older adults

<p>Despite its age-related declines, episodic memory remains sensitive to reward throughout the lifespan. Recent work suggests that prosocial motives are more influential in older vs. younger adults. However, the impact of prosocial reward on episodic memory is yet to be examined. The current study investigated the relative impact of self-serving and prosocial reward in younger and older adults using a motivated-encoding paradigm. Younger (n = 110) and older (n = 102) adults were randomly assigned to a reward recipient (self vs. charity). They viewed a series of scenes associated with high or low reward, with reward receipt contingent on performance during a subsequent old/new recognition test. Contrary to hypotheses, reward magnitude (high/low) and recipient (self/charity) did not influence recognition. However, response bias was sensitive to reward magnitude in both age groups. These findings suggest that the mechanisms of rewardmodulated memory may be similar for self-serving and prosocial reward across adulthood.</p>

<p>Despite its age-related declines, episodic memory remains sensitive to reward throughout the lifespan. Recent work suggests that prosocial motives are more influential in older vs. younger adults. However, the impact of prosocial reward on episodic memory is yet to be examined. The current study investigated the relative impact of self-serving and prosocial reward in younger and older adults using a motivated-encoding paradigm. Younger (n = 110) and older (n = 102) adults were randomly assigned to a reward recipient (self vs. charity). They viewed a series of scenes associated with high or low reward, with reward receipt contingent on performance during a subsequent old/new recognition test. Contrary to hypotheses, reward magnitude (high/low) and recipient (self/charity) did not influence recognition. However, response bias was sensitive to reward magnitude in both age groups. These findings suggest that the mechanisms of rewardmodulated memory may be similar for self-serving and prosocial reward across adulthood.</p>

The Role of Oxytocin in Older Adults’ Facial Emotion Recognition Difficulties

Speechreading and Aging

Although age-related declines in perceiving spoken language are well established, the primary focus of research has been on perception of phonemes, words, and sentences. In contrast, relatively few investigations have been directed at establishing the effects of age on the comprehension of extended spoken passages. Moreover, most previous work has used extreme-group designs in which the performance of a group of young adults is contrasted with that of a group of older adults and little if any information is available regarding changes in listening comprehension across the adult lifespan. Accordingly, the goals of the current investigation were to determine whether there are age differences in listening comprehension across the adult lifespan and, if so, whether similar trajectories are observed for age-related changes in auditory sensitivity and listening comprehension. This study used a cross-sectional lifespan design in which approximately 60 individuals in each of 7 decades, from age 20 to 89 yr (a total of 433 participants), were tested on three different measures of listening comprehension. In addition, we obtained measures of auditory sensitivity from all participants. Changes in auditory sensitivity across the adult lifespan exhibited the progressive high-frequency loss typical of age-related hearing impairment. Performance on the listening comprehension measures, however, demonstrated a very different pattern, with scores on all measures remaining relatively stable until age 65 to 70 yr, after which significant declines were observed. Follow-up analyses indicated that this same general pattern was observed across three different types of passages (lectures, interviews, and narratives) and three different question types (information, integration, and inference). Multiple regression analyses indicated that low-frequency pure-tone average was the single largest contributor to age-related variance in listening comprehension for individuals older than 65 yr, but that age accounted for significant variance even after controlling for auditory sensitivity. Results suggest that age-related reductions in auditory sensitivity account for a sizable portion of individual variance in listening comprehension that was observed across the adult lifespan. Other potential contributors including a possible role for age-related declines in perceptual and cognitive abilities are discussed. Clinically, the results suggest that amplification is likely to improve listening comprehension but that increased audibility alone may not be sufficient to maintain listening comprehension beyond age 65 and 70 yr. Additional research will be needed to identify potential target abilities for training or other rehabilitation procedures that could supplement sensory aids to provide additional improvements in listening comprehension.

Updating prior information with new information in accordance with Bayesian principles is a difficult task. Younger adult decision makers deviate from Bayes’ theorem by either overweighting prior information (i.e., using a conservatism heuristic) or overweighting new information (i.e., using a representativeness heuristic) on decision tasks without feedback. Similar to younger adults, older adults make decisions that require belief updating. Given agerelated decrements in cognitive control, older adults may be at a disadvantage compared with younger adults when updating beliefs. Prior research shows no age differences when making decisions under risk, however older adults perform worse than younger adults when making decisions under ambiguity. Currently it is unknown how older adults use heuristics when updating beliefs about risk and ambiguous information compared with younger adults. The primary aim of this dissertation was to examine age-related differences in the use of heuristics during belief updating, as well as the cognitive processes and neural correlates that underpin behaviour. In three experiments, younger and older adults completed a belief updating task with and without feedback using an urn-ball paradigm. The main results showed that both younger and older adults committed the representativeness error more than the conservatism error, with no age differences observed when updating beliefs without feedback but with younger adults updating beliefs more accurately than older adults with feedback. Further, age differences in the neural correlates that underlie belief updating showed evidence that older adults recruit additional resources in frontal regions of the brain to facilitate performance compared with younger adults. Event-related potentials showed evidence of cognitive control in response to conflicting information in both age groups, but a diminished neural response to feedback in older compared with younger adults. Additionally, while younger adults were not influenced by ambiguous information, older adults avoided committing the representativeness error only when new information was ambiguous. Last, individual differences in numeracy and cognitive reflection, but not thinking disposition, modulated belief updating performance. Together, the results show that younger and older adults can learn to update beliefs with feedback but with younger adults learning to a greater degree than older adults, especially when information is ambiguous.

Updating prior information with new information in accordance with Bayesian principles is a difficult task. Younger adult decision makers deviate from Bayes’ theorem by either overweighting prior information (i.e., using a conservatism heuristic) or overweighting new information (i.e., using a representativeness heuristic) on decision tasks without feedback. Similar to younger adults, older adults make decisions that require belief updating. Given agerelated decrements in cognitive control, older adults may be at a disadvantage compared with younger adults when updating beliefs. Prior research shows no age differences when making decisions under risk, however older adults perform worse than younger adults when making decisions under ambiguity. Currently it is unknown how older adults use heuristics when updating beliefs about risk and ambiguous information compared with younger adults. The primary aim of this dissertation was to examine age-related differences in the use of heuristics during belief updating, as well as the cognitive processes and neural correlates that underpin behaviour. In three experiments, younger and older adults completed a belief updating task with and without feedback using an urn-ball paradigm. The main results showed that both younger and older adults committed the representativeness error more than the conservatism error, with no age differences observed when updating beliefs without feedback but with younger adults updating beliefs more accurately than older adults with feedback. Further, age differences in the neural correlates that underlie belief updating showed evidence that older adults recruit additional resources in frontal regions of the brain to facilitate performance compared with younger adults. Event-related potentials showed evidence of cognitive control in response to conflicting information in both age groups, but a diminished neural response to feedback in older compared with younger adults. Additionally, while younger adults were not influenced by ambiguous information, older adults avoided committing the representativeness error only when new information was ambiguous. Last, individual differences in numeracy and cognitive reflection, but not thinking disposition, modulated belief updating performance. Together, the results show that younger and older adults can learn to update beliefs with feedback but with younger adults learning to a greater degree than older adults, especially when information is ambiguous.

ABSTRACTMeaningful intergenerational interactions between older and younger adults are rare outside of family relationships. Interventions to increase positive intergenerational interactions are growing, but finding appropriate measures of attitudes toward both younger and older age groups is difficult. Many measures assessing attitudes toward older adults can remind participants of negative stereotypes of aging and are rarely used to assess attitudes toward younger adults. We adapted Pittinsky, Rosenthal, and Montoya’s allophilia measure to assess attitudes toward younger (18–25 years old) and older (over age 65) adults. In the first study, 94 traditional college age and 52 older adults rated older and younger adults. The allophilia measure distinguished between younger and older adults’ attitudes toward each age group. In the second study, we compared the age-related allophilia measures with seven traditional measures of attitudes toward older adults. Forty-seven traditional college age students completed measures. As predicted, correlations between allophilia toward older adults and the traditional semantic differential measures were weak (i.e., r = |0.15|or less), whereas correlations with general attitudes toward older adults were more moderate (r = 0.59 or less). Correlations between allophilia toward younger adults and the traditional measures were primarily non-significant as predicted. The allophilia measure differentiated between the five domains of positive attitudes toward younger and older adults and was not highly correlated with measures of more negative attitudes toward older adults. Results suggest that the allophilia measure can fill a need for a measure of positive attitudes toward older and younger adults.

In the aging literature it has been shown that even though emotion recognition performance decreases with age, the decrease is less for happiness than other facial expressions. Studies in younger adults have also revealed that happy faces are more strongly attended to and better recognized than other emotional facial expressions. Thus, there might be a more age independent happy face advantage in facial expression recognition. By using a backward masking paradigm and varying stimulus onset asynchronies (17–267 ms) the temporal development of a happy face advantage, on a continuum from low to high levels of visibility, was examined in younger and older adults. Results showed that across age groups, recognition performance for happy faces was better than for neutral and fearful faces at durations longer than 50 ms. Importantly, the results showed a happy face advantage already during early processing of emotional faces in both younger and older adults. This advantage is discussed in terms of processing of salient perceptual features and elaborative processing of the happy face. We also investigate the combined effect of age and neuroticism on emotional face processing. The rationale was previous findings of age-related differences in physiological arousal to emotional pictures and a relation between arousal and neuroticism. Across all durations, there was an interaction between age and neuroticism, showing that being high in neuroticism might be disadvantageous for younger, but not older adults’ emotion recognition performance during arousal enhancing tasks. These results indicate that there is a relation between aging, neuroticism, and performance, potentially related to physiological arousal.

Functional Assessment in Younger and Older Adults with Sickle Cell Disease

High Diagnostic Uncertainty and Inaccuracy in Adult Emergency Department Patients With Dyspnea: A National Database Analysis.

In younger adults, newly formed procedural memories are weakened by the subsequent formation of episodic memories (E→P interference) and vice versa (P→E interference; “cross-memory interference”). Older adults experience significant decline in episodic memory but maintain relatively intact procedural memory. This asymmetric decline in memory may also cause an asymmetric change in cross-memory interference compared to younger adults. For example, older adults may experience a significant increase in one type of cross-memory interference while leaving the other unchanged. Additionally, decline in episodic memory may cause E→P interference to either increase or decrease depending on how the episodic and procedural memory systems interact. However, no study to our knowledge has compared cross-memory interference between younger and older adults. We investigated cross-memory interference in younger and older adults by measuring E→P (Exp. 1) and P→E (Exp. 2) interference in 40 younger (18-40 years old) and 40 older (≥ 55 years old) adults. Compared to younger adults, the results show that older adults experience significantly stronger E→P interference while P→E interference was statistically indistinguishable between groups. These results confirm that older adults experience an asymmetric increase in cross-memory interference and suggest that the increase in E→P interference is related to the asymmetric decline in episodic memory relative to procedural memory.

Effective processing of multisensory stimuli relies on both the peripheral sensory organs and central processing in subcortical and cortical structures. As we age, there are significant changes in all sensory systems and a variety of cognitive functions. Visual acuity tends to decrease and hearing thresholds generally increase (Kalina 1997; Liu and Yan 2007), whereas performance levels on tasks of motor speed, executive function, and memory typically decline (Rapp and Heindel 1994; Birren and Fisher 1995; Rhodes 2004). There are also widespread changes in the aging brain, including reductions in gray and white matter volume (Good et al. 2001; Salat et al. 2009), alterations in neurotransmitter systems (Muir 1997; Backman et al. 2006), regional hypoperfusion (Martin et al. 1991; Bertsch et al. 2009), and altered patterns of functional activity during cognitive tasks (Cabeza et al. 2004; Grady 2008). Given the extent of age-related alterations in sensation, perception, and cognition, as well as in the anatomy and physiology of the brain, it is not surprising that multisensory integration also changes with age.Several early studies provided mixed results on the differences between multisensory processing in older and younger adults (Stine et al. 1990; Helfer 1998; Strupp et al. 1999; Cienkowski and Carney 2002; Sommers et al. 2005). For example, Stine and colleagues (1990) reported that although younger adults’ memory for news events was better after audiovisual presentation than after auditory information alone, older adults did not show improvement during the multisensory conditions. In contrast, Cienkowski and Carney (2002) demonstrated that audiovisual integration on the McGurk illusion was similar for older and younger adults, and that in some conditions, older adults were even more likely to report the fusion of visual and auditory information than their young counterparts. Similarly, in a study examining the contribution of somatosensory input to participants’ perception of visuospatial orientation, Strupp et al. (1999) reported an age-related increase in the integration of somatosensory information into the multisensory representation of body orientation.Despite providing a good indication that multisensory processing is somehow altered in aging, the results of these studies are somewhat difficult to interpret due to their use of complex cognitive tasks and illusions, and to the variability in analysis methods. Several newer studies that have attempted to address these factors more clearly demonstrate that multisensory integration is enhanced in older adults (Laurienti et al. 2006; Peiffer et al. 2007; Diederich et al. 2008).On a two-choice audiovisual discrimination task, Laurienti and colleagues (2006) showed that response time (RT) benefits for multisensory versus unisensory targets were larger for older adults than for younger adults (Figure 20.1). That is, older adults’ responses during audiovisual conditions were speeded more than younger adults’, when compared with their respective responses during unisensory conditions. Multisensory gains in older adults remained significantly larger than those observed in younger adults, even after controlling for the presence of two targets in the multisensory condition (redundant target effect; Miller 1982, 1986; Laurienti et al. 2006).Using similar analysis methods, Peiffer et al. (2007) also reported increased multisensory gains in older adults. On a simple RT task, where average unisensory RTs were equivalent in younger and older adults, older adults actually responded faster than younger adults on multisensory trials because of their enhanced multisensory integration (Peiffer et al. 2007). Diederich and colleagues (2008) have also shown that older adults exhibit greater speeding of responses to multisensory targets than younger adults on a saccadic RT task. The analysis methods used in this experiment indicate a slowing of peripheral sensory processing, as well as a wider time window over which integration of auditory and visual stimuli can occur (Diederich et al. 2008).These experiments highlight several possible explanations that could help answer a critical question about multisensory processing in aging: Why do older adults exhibit greater integration of multisensory stimuli than younger adults? Potential sources of enhanced integration in older adults include age-related cognitive slowing not specific to multisensory processing, inverse effectiveness associated with sensory deficits, alterations in the temporal parameters of integration, and inefficient top–down modulation of sensory processing. In the following sections we will investigate each of these possible explanations in greater detail and offer some alternative hypotheses for the basis of enhanced multisensory integration in older adults.

Older adults are known to have more difficulty recognizing words with dense phonological neighbourhoods (Sommers & Danielson, 1999), suggesting an increased role of inhibition in older adults’ spoken word recognition. Revill and Spieler (2012) found that older adults are particularly susceptible to frequency effects, and will look more to high frequency items compared to younger adults. We aim to replicate and extend the findings of Revill and Spieler (2012) by investigating the role of inhibition along with frequency for resolving lexical competition in both older and younger adults. Older (n = 16) and younger (n = 18) adults completed a visual word paradigm eyetracking task that used high and low frequency targets paired with competitors of opposing frequency, and a Simon task as a measure of inhibition. We find that older adults with poorer inhibition are more distracted by competitors than those with better inhibition and younger adults. This effect is larger for high frequency competitors compared to low. These results have implications for the changing role of inhibition in resolving lexical competition across the adult lifespan and support the idea that decreased inhibition in older adults contributes to increased lexical competition and stronger frequency effects in word recognition.

The hyperemic response to passive leg movement (PLM) is largely (~80%) nitric oxide (NO) mediated in young adults, whereas both the overall response and NO contribution (~20%) are diminished in older adults. A transient hyperemic response remains in both groups after NO blockade, however, the mechanisms contributing to this remaining response are unknown. Vasodilatory substances including prostaglandins (PG) and endothelial derived hyperpolarizing factors (EDHF) are primary candidates contributing to PLM response. Moreover, these underlying mechanisms of the PLM response are likely influenced by exercise training in both young and older adults but this remains to be determined. Thus, we sought to determine if 1) PG and EDHF contribute to the hyperemic response in older adults, and 2) exercise training alters the mechanisms contributing to changes in PLM (i.e., NO, PG, or EDHF). The leg blood flow (LBF) response to PLM was measured by Doppler ultrasound in 9 young (25±4 yr) and 9 older (69±5 yr) adult males. PLM was performed with intra-arterial infusions of saline (control), NG-monomethyl-L-arginine (L-NMMA) to inhibit NOS and NO production, and a combination of L-NMMA, ketorolac tromethamine (KET) to inhibit cyclooxygenase and PG production, and fluconazole (FLUC) to inhibit cytochrome P-450 and EDHF (L-NMMA+KET+FLUC). This PLM and drug infusion protocol were repeated following 8 weeks of single leg knee-extension (KE) exercise training to determine if the vasodilatory mechanisms regulating PLM-induced hyperemia are altered by exercise training. The hyperemic response to PLM (total LBF area under the curve) was significantly attenuated from control with infusion of L-NMMA in young adults (-287±280 mL, p<0.05) but remained unchanged in the older (-55±86 mL, P=0.70). Combined infusion of L-NMMA+KET+FLUC yielded similar results such that PLM decreased to the same degree as L-NMMA in young (-276±108 mL, p<0.05) with no significant change in older adults (-116±81 mL, P=0.36). Following 8 weeks of single leg KE training, maximal power (KEmax) improved in both young (+33±13 W, p<0.05) and older adults (+16±8 W, p<0.05). Despite improvements in KEmax, the hyperemic response to PLM only increased in young adults by ~30% (454±194 v. 604±351 mL, p<0.05), while no improvement was observed in older adults (225±142 v. 236±89 mL, P=0.86). The contribution of NO to PLM did not change following exercise training in either young (-238±217 mL, P=0.14) or older (-62±82 mL, P=0.72) adults. Likewise, the contribution of PG and EDHF also did not change in both young (-306±222 mL, P=0.68) and older (-108±116 mL, P=0.77) adults. These findings indicate that PG and EDHF do not have an additive effect to NO on the hyperemic response to PLM in both young and older adults. Therefore, the remaining hyperemic response following combined NO, PG, and EDHF inhibition is likely driven by non-endothelial dependent mechanisms. Moreover, these data indicate that 8 weeks of KE specific exercise training significantly improves the hyperemic response to PLM in young but not older adults. Interestingly, the observed improvements to PLM were not directly mediated through the NO, PG, or EDHF pathways but by some other, currently unidentified, mechanism. National Institutes of Health R01HL142603 (to J.D. Trinity) This abstract was presented at the American Physiology Summit 2025 and is only available in HTML format. There is no downloadable file or PDF version. The Physiology editorial board was not involved in the peer review process.