Resting-State fMRI Associated with Stop-Signal Task Performance in Healthy Middle-Aged and Elderly People

Several brain regions and connectivity networks may be altered as aging occurs. We are interested in investigating if resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (RS-fMRI) can also be valid as an indicator of individual differences in association with inhibition performance among aged (including middle-aged) people. Seventy-two healthy adults (40–77 years of age) were recruited. Their RS-fMRI images were acquired and analyzed via two cluster-analysis methods: local synchronization of spontaneous brain activity measured by regional homogeneity (ReHo) and fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations (fALFF) of blood oxygenation level-dependent signals. After the RS-fMRI acquisition, participants were instructed to perform a stop-signal task, in which the stop signal reaction time (SSRT) was calculated based on the horse-race model. Among participants, the ReHo/fALFF and SSRT were correlated with and without partialling-out the effect of age. The results of this study showed that, although aging may alter brain networks, the spontaneous activity of the age-related brain networks can still serve as an effective indicator of individual differences in association with inhibitory performance in healthy middle-aged and elderly people. This is the first study to use both ReHo and fALFF on the same dataset for conjunction analyses showing the relationship between stopping performance and RS-fMRI in the elderly population. The relationship may have practical clinical applications. Based on the overall results, the current study demonstrated that the bilateral inferior frontal gyrus and parts of the default mode network activation were negatively correlated with SSRT, suggesting that they have crucial roles in inhibitory function. However, the pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA) and SMA played only a small role during the resting state in association with stopping performance

Buddha as an Eye Opener: A Link between Prosocial Attitude and Attentional Control

Increasing evidence suggests that religious practice induces systematic biases in attentional control. We used Navon's global–local task to compare attentional bias in Taiwanese Zen Buddhists and Taiwanese atheists; two groups brought up in the same country and culture and matched with respect to race, intelligence, sex, and age. Given the Buddhist emphasis on compassion for the physical and social environment, we expected a more global bias in Buddhist than in Atheist participants. In line with these expectations, Buddhists showed a larger global-precedence effect and increased interference from global distracters when processing local information. This pattern reinforces the idea that people's attentional processing style reflects biases rewarded by their religious practices

Young Adults View Smartphone Tracking Technologies for COVID-19 as Acceptable:The Case of Taiwan

Taiwan has been successful in controlling the spread of SARS-CoV-2 during the COVID-19 pandemic; however, without a vaccine the threat of a second outbreak remains. Young adults who show few to no symptoms when infected have been identified in many countries as driving the virus' spread through unidentifiable community transmission. Mobile tracking technologies register nearby contacts of a user and notifies them if one later tests positive to the virus, potentially solving this issue; however, the effectiveness of these technologies depends on their acceptance by the public. The current study assessed attitudes towards three tracking technologies (telecommunication network tracking, a government app, and Apple and Google's Bluetooth exposure notification system) among four samples of young Taiwanese adults (aged 25 years or younger). Using Bayesian methods, we find high acceptance for all three tracking technologies (>75%), with acceptance for each technology surpassing 90% if additional privacy measures were included. We consider the policy implications of these results for Taiwan and similar cultures

Mediating role of resilience in the relationships of physical activity and mindful self-awareness with peace of mind among college students

Abstract Peace of mind (PoM) is an index of mental health in Asian culture and emphasizes low arousal, happiness, harmony, and an internal state of peacefulness. While previous studies have found that mindful self-awareness can contribute to PoM, regular physical activity (PA) is also an important factor contributing to one’s PoM due to its function in promoting one's resilience. The study aims to investigate a hypothetical model that assumes PA is associated with resilience while controlling for mindful self-awareness, contributing to PoM. The PoM scale, Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, Chinese translation of Mindful Attention Awareness Scale, and PA self-report questionnaire were used. A path analysis was applied to test the association between these variables and the mediating role of resilience. A total of 436 students from a university in Taiwan were recruited; the mean age was 20.87, with 46.3% female and 73.6% engaging in over 150 min/week of moderate PA. Gender and age negatively correlated with PA. After controlling for age and gender, there was no direct effect of physical activity on PoM; both mindful self-awareness and PA predict resilience, which in turn predicts PoM, suggesting that both cognitive (i.e., mindful self-awareness) and PA are important to cultivate resilience and thus PoM

Specific but not general declines in attention and executive function with aging: Converging cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence across the adult lifespan

ObjectiveAttention and executive function (EF) are vulnerable to aging. However, whether all these functions generally decline with aging is not known. Furthermore, most evidence is based on cross-sectional data and fewer follow-up data are available in the literature. Longitudinal follow-up studies are necessary to characterize individualized and precise changes in cognitive function. Additionally, relatively few aging studies have included middle-aged adults to examine age-related differences in attention and EF. Therefore, this study aims to examine whether general or specific attention and EF decline with aging from adulthood to old age by combining cross-sectional and longitudinal follow-up approaches.MethodsThis study recruited 253 participants aged 20 to 78  years. passing a prescreening procedure (see main text for detail) for the baseline session, and 123 of them were invited to return 1 ~ 2  years after their first visit to participate in the follow-up session. The participants completed a series of attention and EF tasks at both the baseline and follow-up sessions, which measured alerting, orienting, conflict control, stopping, memory updating, and switching abilities. We applied linear and nonlinear regression models to evaluate the cross-sectional age effect on attention and EF and employed a modified Brinley plot to inspect follow-up performance against baseline in attention and EF.ResultsThe results of cross-sectional data showed that older adults exhibited decreased efficiency in alerting, stopping, and memory updating but paradoxically increased efficiency in conflict control and switching abilities and no changes in orienting efficiency with age. However, the results of longitudinal data showed that only alerting and memory updating continued to show decreased efficiency. Furthermore, conflict control and switching showed increased efficiency with aging, whereas the orienting network, and stopping no longer showed decreased efficiency.ConclusionThus, converging the cross-sectional and longitudinal data showed that the alerting and memory updating function exhibited the most robust deficit with age (cross-sectional) and aging (longitudinal). Alerting and memory updating abilities are crucial survival skills for human beings. Therefore, developing methods to prevent and improve an individual’s alertness and working memory ability is an important practical issue in aging research

Cross-sectional white matter microstructure differences in age and trait mindfulness.

The process of aging can be characterized by a decline in cognitive performance, which may be accompanied by deterioration in specific structural properties of the brain. In this study we sought to investigate to what extent mindfulness changes over the aging process, and which alterations in brain structure can be associated to aging and concomitant changes in mindfulness. We collected Mindful Attention Awareness Scale questionnaire data to assess trait mindfulness and acquired diffusion-weighted imaging data fitted to the diffusion tensor model (DTI) in a group of 97 middle-aged to elderly participants. Our results showed that trait mindfulness increased with age. In terms of white matter structure our results suggested that there was a general increase of omnidirectional diffusion, which favored radial over axial diffusivity, leading to a decrease in fractional anisotropy (FA) in older participants. We further showed that trait mindfulness mediated the FA-age effect in a localized area consisting of the internal and external capsule, as well as the corona radiata. The implication of this mediation analysis is that trait mindfulness may deter age-associated neurocognitive decline, perhaps by preventing age-associated microlesions specifically in cortico-subcortical white matter tracts. This study can be considered a pioneer of using DTI studies to investigate the relationship between age and trait mindfulness

The relationship between internet-gaming experience and executive functions measured by virtual environment compared with conventional laboratory multitasks.

The aim of this study was to investigate if individuals with frequent internet gaming (IG) experience exhibited better or worse multitasking ability compared with those with infrequent IG experience. The individuals' multitasking abilities were measured using virtual environment multitasks, such as Edinburgh Virtual Errands Test (EVET), and conventional laboratory multitasks, such as the dual task and task switching. Seventy-two young healthy college students participated in this study. They were split into two groups based on the time spent on playing online games, as evaluated using the Internet Use Questionnaire. Each participant performed EVET, dual-task, and task-switching paradigms on a computer. The current results showed that the frequent IG group performed better on EVET compared with the infrequent IG group, but their performance on the dual-task and task-switching paradigms did not differ significantly. The results suggest that the frequent IG group exhibited better multitasking efficacy if measured using a more ecologically valid task, but not when measured using a conventional laboratory multitasking task. The differences in terms of the subcomponents of executive function measured by these task paradigms were discussed. The current results show the importance of the task effect while evaluating frequent internet gamers' multitasking ability