Facial recognition and visual processing as we age:Using the Thatcher illusion with famous and non-famous faces

This paper reports a study examining preferred visual processes in recognition of facial features in older vs younger age groups, using Thatcherised images of famous and non-famous people in the one study. The aims were to determine whether decline in visual system processing occurs increasingly as we grow older, and whether there is less decline in recognition of famous (or familiar) faces. Three groups (younger, middle-old and older) made up the sample of 73 people (aged 19-82 years). Visual decline in face recognition across the age groups was assessed based on the Thatcher illusion—using four famous and four non-famous faces either with normal features or with distorted features. The faces were presented one at a time on computer screen, and participants were asked to judge whether the face was distorted (eyes and/or mouth not aligned in relation to the face); in addition, time taken to decision (latency) was also measured. Decline was found in visual processing such that older individuals gave limited attention to facial details (processing faces holistically, with detail errors) and they took longer to decide. Whether the faces were famous or not did not have significant effects on the decisions and there was no interaction with age, though famous faces were given longer attention. Our visual system processes decline as we age in that we give less attention to details and more to holistic processing and so make more errors in recognition. Implications for treatment or amelioration of the effects are discussed.</jats:p

Age-Related Increases in Verbal Knowledge Are Not Associated With Word Finding Problems in the Cam-CAN Cohort: What You Know Won't Hurt You.

Objective: We tested the claim that age-related increases in knowledge interfere with word retrieval, leading to word finding failures. We did this by relating a measure of crystallized intelligence to tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states and picture naming accuracy. Method: Participants were from a large (N = 708), cross-sectional (aged 18-88 years), population-based sample from the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience cohort (Cam-CAN; www.cam-can.com). They completed (a) the Spot-the-Word Test (STW), a measure of crystallized intelligence in which participants circled the real word in word/nonword pairs, (b) a TOT-inducing task, and (c) a picture naming task. Results: Age and STW independently predicted TOTs, with higher TOTs for older adults and for participants with lower STW scores. Tests of a moderator model examining interactions between STW and age indicated that STW was a significant negative predictor of TOTs in younger adults, but with increasing age, the effect size gradually approached zero. Results using picture naming accuracy replicated these findings. Discussion: These results do not support the hypothesis that lifelong knowledge acquisition leads to interference that causes an age-related increase in TOTs. Instead, crystallized intelligence supports successful word retrieval, although this relationship weakens across adulthood

Cognitive Abilities to Explain Individual Variation in the Interpretation ofComplex Sentences by Older Adults

This paper investigates which cognitive abilities predict theinterpretation of complex sentences by older adults.Participants performed a picture-selection task after hearingcomplex and simpler sentences, as well as a broad testbattery of cognitive tests. The results show that differentcognitive factors serve as predictors for the interpretation ofcomplex sentences compared to simpler sentences. Forcomplex sentences, verbal intelligence, cognitive flexibility,and working memory capacity are strong predictors. Ourstudy thus shows that older adults' interpretation of sentencesof varying complexity is influenced by different cognitiveabilities, and stresses the need to take such individualdifferences into account when studying language processing

Sleep: The hebbian reinforcement of the local inhibitory synapses

International audienceSleep is ubiquitous among the animal realm, and represents about 30% of our lives. Despite numerous efforts, the reason behind our need for sleep is still unknown. The Theory of neuronal Cognition (TnC) proposes that sleep is the period of time during which the local inhibitory synapses (in particular the cortical ones) are replenished. Indeed, as long as the active brain stays awake, hebbian learning guarantees that efficient inhibitory synapses lose their efficiency – just because they are efficient at avoiding the activation of the targeted neurons. Since hebbian learning is the only known mechanism of synapse modification, it follows that to replenish the inhibitory synapses’ efficiency, source and targeted neurons must be activated together. This is achieved by a local depolarization that may travel (wave). The period of time during which such slow waves are experienced has been named the ‘‘slow-wave sleep’’ (SWS). It is cut into several pieces by shorter periods of paradoxical sleep (REM) which activity resembles that of the awake state. Indeed, SWS – because it only allows local neural activation – decreases the excitatory long distance connections strength. To avoid losing the associations built during the awake state, these long distance activations are played again during the REM sleep. REM and SWS sleeps act together to guarantee that when the subject awakes again, his inhibitory synaptic efficiency is restored and his (excitatory) long distance associations are still there

The mismeasurement of mind:How neuropsychological testing creates a false picture of cognitive aging

Age-related declines in scores on neuropsychological tests arewidely believed to reveal that human cognitive capacitiesdecline across the lifespan. In a computational simulation, weshow how the behavioral patterns observed in PairedAssociate Learning (PAL), a particularly sensitive measure ofage-related performance change (Rabbitt &amp; Lowe, 2000), arepredicted by the models used to formalize associative learningprocesses in other areas of behavioral and neuroscientificresearch. The simulation further predicts that manipulatinglanguage exposure will reproduce the experience-relatedperformance differences erroneously attributed to age-relateddecline in age-matched adults. Consistent with this, olderbilinguals outperformed native speakers in a German PALtest, an advantage that increased with age. These analyses andresults show that age-related PAL performance changesreflect the predictable effects of learning on the associabilityof test items, and indicate that failing to control for theseeffects is distorting our understanding of cognitive and braindevelopment in adulthood

The Structure of Names in Memory:Deviations from Uniform Entropy Impair Memory for Linguistic Sequences

Human languages can be seen as socially evolved systems thathave been structured to optimize information flow incommunication. Communication appears to proceed both moreefficiently and more fluently when information is distributedevenly across the linguistic signal. In previous work (Ramscaret al., 2013), we used tools from information theory to examinehow naming systems evolved to meet this requirementhistorically, and how, over the past several hundred years,social legislation and rapid population growth have disruptednaming practices in the West, making names ever harder toprocess and remember. In support of these observations, wepresent findings from three experiments investigating namefluency, recognition, and recall. These results provideconverging empirical evidence for an optimal solution to namedesign, and offer a more nuanced understanding of how socialengineering has impaired the structure of names in memory

The relationship between thematic, lexical, and syntactic features of written texts and personality traits

The relationship between linguistic features of written texts and personality traits was investigated. Linguistic features used in this study were thematic (co-occurrence of the most frequent content words across participants), lexical (the maximum of new words) and syntactic (average sentence length). Personality traits were measured by VP+2 questionnaire standardized for Serbian population. Research was conducted on text materials collected from 114 Serbian participants (age 15–65), in their native tongue. Results showed that participants who gained low scores on Conscientiousness and high scores on Neuroticism and Negative Valence wrote about repeated daily activities and everyday life, but not about job-related matters or life perspective. Higher scores on Aggressiveness and Negative Valence coincided with writing about job-related matters and with the lower lexical richness. By showing that thematic content of text materials is affected by personality traits, these results support and expand previous findings regarding the relationship between personality and linguistic behaviour

The macroscope : a tool for examining the historical structure of language

The recent rise in digitized historical text has made it possible to quantitatively study our psychological past. This involves understanding changes in what words meant, how words were used, and how these changes may have responded to changes in the environment, such as in healthcare, wealth disparity, and war. Here we make available a tool, the Macroscope, for studying historical changes in language over the last two centuries. The Macroscope uses over 155 billion words of historical text, which will grow as we include new historical corpora, and derives word properties from frequency-of-usage and co-occurrence patterns over time. Using co-occurrence patterns, the Macroscope can track changes in semantics, allowing researchers to identify semantically stable and unstable words in historical text and providing quantitative information about changes in a word’s valence, arousal, and concreteness, as well as information about new properties, such as semantic drift. The Macroscope provides information about both the local and global properties of words, as well as information about how these properties change over time, allowing researchers to visualize and download data in order to make inferences about historical psychology. Although quantitative historical psychology represents a largely new field of study, we see this work as complementing a wealth of other historical investigations, offering new insights and new approaches to understanding existing theory. The Macroscope is avail- able online at http://www.macroscope.tech