Human cognitive neuroscience seminar

Speakers:  Alicia Forsberg and Thalia Theodoraki

Topic: Working memory, verbal labels, and healthy cognitive ageing

Abstracts:

Alicia Forsberg: Visual Working Memory (WM) tends to decline more rapidly with ageing than verbal WM. Therefore, we hypothesised that older adults might rely more on verbal strategies to remember visually presented stimuli. In three experiments, we compared memory for easy- or difficult-to name colours and shapes in younger and older adults. Overall, memory was better for easier-to-name items, and younger participants performed better than older. Older adults had a significantly larger performance drop between easy- and difficult-to-name colours, consistent with higher reliance on verbal memory strategies. However, such an age-related benefit for easy-to-name items was not observed for memory for shapes. I will discuss these results in relation to discrepancies in previous research on feature-binding deficits in healthy older adults.

Thalia Theodoraki: Executive functions (EFs) refer to mental control processes that regulate one’s thoughts and behaviour in a goal directed manner. The development of executive functions (EFs) has mainly been researched in younger children up to early adolescence, despite indications that particular aspects of EFs continue to develop throughout adolescence and into adulthood. In order to discover more about EFs after puberty my PhD project focuses on EFs in adolescence:

a) whether they develop during the latter part of adolescence and

b) how they are related to academic attainment.

In this talk, I will present the results of my first completed study that examined the development of three key EFs (inhibition, shifting and WM updating) within a large sample of secondary school students aged 14-17 years old.