Abstract
Findings suggest a positive impact of bilingualism on cognition, including the later onset of dementia. However, it is not clear to what extent these effects are influenced by variations in attentional control demands in response to specific task requirements. In this study, 20 bilingual and 20 monolingual older adults performed a task-switching task under explicit task-cuing vs. memory-based switching conditions. In the cued condition, task switches occurred in random order and a visual cue signaled the next task to be performed. In the memory-based condition, the task alternated after every second trial in a predictable sequence without presenting a cue. The performance of bilinguals did not vary across experimental conditions, whereas monolinguals experienced a pronounced increase in response latencies and error rates in the cued condition. Both groups produced similar switch costs (difference in performance on switch trials as opposed to repeating trials within the mixed-task block) and mixing costs (difference in performance on repeat trials of a mixed-task block as opposed to trials of a single-task block), but bilinguals produced them with lower response latencies. The cognitive benefits of bilingualism seem not to apply to executive functions per se but to affect specific cognitive processes that involve task-relevant context processing. The present results suggest that lifelong bilingualism could promote in older adults a flexible adjustment to environmental cues, but only with increased task demands. However, due to the small sample size, the results should be interpreted with caution.
Highlights
Modern societies are characterized by population aging due to increased life expectancy and falling birth rates, with older adults making up a growing proportion of the population (Gavrilov and Heuveline, 2003)
Switch costs are defined as the difference in performance on switch trials as opposed to repeat trials, within the mixed-task blocks
The results of the present study suggest that bilinguals shift their attention more efficiently than monolinguals when the task requirements mimic context-related dual-language management
Summary
Modern societies are characterized by population aging due to increased life expectancy and falling birth rates, with older adults making up a growing proportion of the population (Gavrilov and Heuveline, 2003). This demographic aging implies exponential growth in the number of people who will experience age-related declines in cognition, and in the incidence and prevalence of dementia, and entails an important economic impact for caregivers and public health systems (World Health Organization, 2012; Hurd et al, 2013). This phenomenon is referred to as cognitive reserve (Barulli and Stern, 2013).
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