Assistive Technology for Successful Aging: Perspectives from Developmental Behavioral and Neuroscience

Growing into old age is a personal privilege and a societal achievement. However, it is also a challenge for both the individuals and societies. The impressive gains in extending average physical longevity to 75 years and beyond is not necessary accompanied by high-levels of physical, psychological, and brain "fitness". Thus, it is important to seek ways to help older adults maintaining functions in these domains in order to maintain life quality in old age. Adaptive assistive devices and environments are promising technological advancements for promoting successful aging. Sufficient plasticity in the aging psychological and neurocognitive systems are necessary for technologies to engender desired effects. Designs and evaluations of assistive technologies need to consider dynamic changes in developmental resources across the lifespan. This paper reviews evidence of behavioral and neurocognitive plasticity in old age and highlights psychological principles for successful aging technologies

Hyper-brain hyper-frequency network topology dynamics when playing guitar in quartet

Ensemble music performance is a highly coordinated form of social behavior requiring not only precise motor actions but also synchronization of different neural processes both within and between the brains of ensemble players. In previous analyses, which were restricted to within-frequency coupling (WFC), we showed that different frequencies participate in intra- and inter-brain coordination, exhibiting distinct network topology dynamics that underlie coordinated actions and interactions. However, many of the couplings both within and between brains are likely to operate across frequencies. Hence, to obtain a more complete picture of hyper-brain interaction when musicians play the guitar in a quartet, cross-frequency coupling (CFC) has to be considered as well. Furthermore, WFC and CFC can be used to construct hyper-brain hyper-frequency networks (HB-HFNs) integrating all the information flows between different oscillation frequencies, providing important details about ensemble interaction in terms of network topology dynamics (NTD). Here, we reanalyzed EEG (electroencephalogram) data obtained from four guitarists playing together in quartet to explore changes in HB-HFN topology dynamics and their relation to acoustic signals of the music. Our findings demonstrate that low-frequency oscillations (e.g., delta, theta, and alpha) play an integrative or pacemaker role in such complex networks and that HFN topology dynamics are specifically related to the guitar quartet playing dynamics assessed by sound properties. Simulations by link removal showed that the HB-HFN is relatively robust against loss of connections, especially when the strongest connections are preserved and when the loss of connections only affects the brain of one guitarist. We conclude that HB-HFNs capture neural mechanisms that support interpersonally coordinated action and behavioral synchrony

Where People Live and Die Makes a Difference: Individual and Geographic Disparities in Well-Being Progression at the End of Life

Lifespan psychological research has long been interested in the contextual embeddedness of individual development. To examine if and how regional factors relate to between-person disparities in the progression of late-life well-being, we applied three-level growth curve models to 24-year longitudinal data from deceased participants of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (N = 3,427; age at death: 18 to 101 years). Results indicate steep declines in well-being with impending death, with some 8% of the between-person differences in both level and decline of well-being reflecting between-county differences. Exploratory analyses revealed that individuals living and dying in less affluent counties reported lower late-life well-being, controlling for key individual predictors including age at death, gender, education, and household income. The regional factors examined did not directly relate to well-being change, but were found to moderate (e.g., amplify) the disparities in change attributed to individual factors. Our results suggest that resource-poor counties provide relatively less fertile grounds for successful aging until the end of life and may serve to exacerbate disparities. We conclude that examinations of how individual and residential characteristics interact can further our understanding of individual psychological outcomes and suggest routes for future inquiry.Neighborhoods, Selective mortality, successful aging, differential aging, psychosocial factors, well-being, longitudinal methods

Adult Age Differences and the Role of Cognitive Resources in Perceptual-Motor Skill Acquisition: Application of a Multilevel Negative Exponential Model

The effects of advanced age and cognitive resources on the course of skill acquisition are unclear, and discrepancies among studies may reflect limitations of data analytic approaches. We applied a multilevel negative exponential model to skill acquisition data from 80 trials (four 20-trial blocks) of a pursuit rotor task administered to healthy adults (19-80 years old). The analyses conducted at the single-trial level indicated that the negative exponential function described performance well. Learning parameters correlated with measures of task-relevant cognitive resources on all blocks except the last and with age on all blocks after the second. Thus, age differences in motor skill acquisition may evolve in 2 phases: In the first, age differences are collinear with individual differences in task-relevant cognitive resources; in the second, age differences orthogonal to these resources emerg

Late-Life Decline in Well-Being across Adulthood in Germany, the UK, and the US: Something Is Seriously Wrong at the End of Life

Throughout adulthood and old age, levels of well-being appear to remain relatively stable. However, evidence is emerging that late in life well-being declines considerably. Using long-term longitudinal data of deceased participants in national samples from Germany, the UK, and the US, we examine how long this period lasts. In all three nations and across the adult age range, well-being was relatively stable over age, but declined rapidly with impending death. Articulating notions of terminal decline associated with impending death, we identified prototypical transition points in each study between three and five years prior to death, after which normative rates of decline steepened by a factor of three or more. The findings suggest that mortality-related mechanisms drive late-life changes in well-being and highlight the need for further refinement of psychological concepts about how and when late-life declines in psychosocial functioning prototypically begin.Selective mortality, successful aging, differential aging, psychosocial factors, well-being, multiphase growth model

Feature-based interference from unattended visual field during attentional tracking in younger and older adults

The ability to attend to multiple objects that move in the visual field is important for many aspects of daily functioning. The attentional capacity for such dynamic tracking, however, is highly limited and undergoes age-related decline. Several aspects of the tracking process can influence performance. Here, we investigated effects of feature-based interference from distractor objects that appear in unattended regions of the visual field with a hemifield-tracking task. Younger and older participants performed an attentional tracking task in one hemifield while distractor objects were concurrently presented in the unattended hemifield. Feature similarity between objects in the attended and unattended hemifields as well as motion speed and the number of to-be-tracked objects were parametrically manipulated. The results show that increasing feature overlap leads to greater interference from the unattended visual field. This effect of feature-based interference was only present in the slow speed condition, indicating that the interference is mainly modulated by perceptual demands. High-performing older adults showed a similar interference effect as younger adults, whereas low-performing adults showed poor tracking performance overall

Hyper-Frequency Network Topology Changes During Choral Singing

Choral singing requires the coordination of physiological subsystems within and across individuals. Previously, we suggested that the choir functions as a superordinate system that imposes boundary conditions on the dynamic features of the individual singers and found reliable differences in the network topography by analyzing within- and cross-frequency couplings (WFC and CFC, respectively). Here, we further refine our analyses to investigate hyper-frequency network (HFN) topology structures (i.e., the layout or arrangement of connections) using a graph-theoretical approach. In a sample of eleven singers and one conductor engaged in choral singing (aged between 23 and 56 years, and including five men and seven women), we calculated phase coupling (WFC and CFC) between respiratory, cardiac, and vocalizing subsystems across ten frequencies of interest. All these couplings were used for construction of HFN with nodes being a combination of frequency components and subsystems across choir participants. With regard to the network topology measures, we found that clustering coefficients (CCs) as well as local and global efficiency were highest and characteristic path lengths, correspondingly, were shortest when the choir sang a canon in parts as compared to singing it in unison. Furthermore, these metrics revealed a significant relationship to individual heart rate, as an indicator of arousal, and to an index of heart rate variability indicated by the LF/HF ratio (low and high frequency, respectively), and reflecting the balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. In addition, we found that the CC and local efficiency for groups singing the same canon part were higher than for groups of singers constructed randomly post hoc, indicating stronger neighbor–neighbor connections in the former. We conclude that network topology dynamics are a crucial determinant of group behavior and may represent a potent biomarker for social interaction

Neuroanatomical Correlates of Fluid Intelligence in Healthy Adults and Persons with Vascular Risk Factors

The main objective of this study was to examine the effects of regional brain changes on cognitive decline and the modifying influence of vascular risk (VR) factors. We present latent difference score analyses of associations among 5-year changes in 12 regional brain volumes and age-sensitive cognitive functions in 87 adults (32 with identifiable VR factors). We found reliable individual differences in volume change for 11 of the 12 brain regions but not in the cognitive measures that showed average longitudinal decline. Thus, associations between rates of change in fluid intelligence and brain volumes could not be assessed. We observed, however, that lower levels of fluid intelligence were associated with smaller prefrontal and hippocampal volumes. Lower fluid intelligence scores were also linked to greater longitudinal shrinkage of the entorhinal cortex (EC). After accounting for the effects of age, sex, and VR factors, the orbitofrontal cortex and the prefrontal white matter (PFw) volumes as well as the 5-year change in the EC volume predicted fluid intelligence level. VR was independently associated with smaller prefrontal volumes and lower fluid intelligence. Thus, prefrontal and medial-temporal systems may play different roles in age-related differences and changes in cognitive performanc