TY - JOUR
T1 - Effects of age on cognitive control during semantic categorization
AU - Mudar, Raksha A.
AU - Chiang, Hsueh Sheng
AU - Maguire, Mandy J.
AU - Spence, Jeffrey S.
AU - Eroh, Justin
AU - Kraut, Michael A.
AU - Hart, John
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors thank Dr. Elizabeth K. Bartz, Rajen Patel, Monique Salinas, Erin Venza, Audette Rackley, Claire Gardner, Amy Strohman, Ewa Nawacki, Natalie Gannon, and Lukasz Pazdan for their invaluable assistance in data collection. This work was funded by grants from the National Institute of Health (RC1-AG035954), the RGK Foundation, and the Berman Research Initiative at the University of Texas at Dallas and CHAD pilot grant at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The funding sources had no involvement in study design, data collection, analysis and interpretation of data or in the writing of the report.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015.
PY - 2015/7/1
Y1 - 2015/7/1
N2 - We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to study age effects of perceptual (basic-level) vs. perceptual-semantic (superordinate-level) categorization on cognitive control using the go/nogo paradigm. Twenty-two younger (11 M; 21. ±. 2.2 years) and 22 older adults (9 M; 63. ±. 5.8 years) completed two visual go/nogo tasks. In the single-car task (SiC) (basic), go/nogo responses were made based on single exemplars of a car (go) and a dog (nogo). In the object animal task (ObA) (superordinate), responses were based on multiple exemplars of objects (go) and animals (nogo). Each task consisted of 200 trials: 160 (80%) 'go' trials that required a response through button pressing and 40 (20%) 'nogo' trials that required inhibition/withholding of a response. ERP data revealed significantly reduced nogo-N2 and nogo-P3 amplitudes in older compared to younger adults, whereas go-N2 and go-P3 amplitudes were comparable in both groups during both categorization tasks. Although the effects of categorization levels on behavioral data and P3 measures were similar in both groups with longer response times, lower accuracy scores, longer P3 latencies, and lower P3 amplitudes in ObA compared to SiC, N2 latency revealed age group differences moderated by the task. Older adults had longer N2 latency for ObA compared to SiC, in contrast, younger adults showed no N2 latency difference between SiC and ObA. Overall, these findings suggest that age differentially affects neural processing related to cognitive control during semantic categorization. Furthermore, in older adults, unlike in younger adults, levels of categorization modulate neural processing related to cognitive control even at the early stages (N2).
AB - We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to study age effects of perceptual (basic-level) vs. perceptual-semantic (superordinate-level) categorization on cognitive control using the go/nogo paradigm. Twenty-two younger (11 M; 21. ±. 2.2 years) and 22 older adults (9 M; 63. ±. 5.8 years) completed two visual go/nogo tasks. In the single-car task (SiC) (basic), go/nogo responses were made based on single exemplars of a car (go) and a dog (nogo). In the object animal task (ObA) (superordinate), responses were based on multiple exemplars of objects (go) and animals (nogo). Each task consisted of 200 trials: 160 (80%) 'go' trials that required a response through button pressing and 40 (20%) 'nogo' trials that required inhibition/withholding of a response. ERP data revealed significantly reduced nogo-N2 and nogo-P3 amplitudes in older compared to younger adults, whereas go-N2 and go-P3 amplitudes were comparable in both groups during both categorization tasks. Although the effects of categorization levels on behavioral data and P3 measures were similar in both groups with longer response times, lower accuracy scores, longer P3 latencies, and lower P3 amplitudes in ObA compared to SiC, N2 latency revealed age group differences moderated by the task. Older adults had longer N2 latency for ObA compared to SiC, in contrast, younger adults showed no N2 latency difference between SiC and ObA. Overall, these findings suggest that age differentially affects neural processing related to cognitive control during semantic categorization. Furthermore, in older adults, unlike in younger adults, levels of categorization modulate neural processing related to cognitive control even at the early stages (N2).
KW - Aging
KW - Categorization
KW - Cognitive control
KW - Event-related potentials
KW - Semantic
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84926684203&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84926684203&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.bbr.2015.03.042
DO - 10.1016/j.bbr.2015.03.042
M3 - Article
C2 - 25823764
AN - SCOPUS:84926684203
SN - 0166-4328
VL - 287
SP - 285
EP - 293
JO - Behavioural Brain Research
JF - Behavioural Brain Research
ER -