Key mental abilities can actually improve during aging

Date:
August 19, 2021
Source:
Georgetown University Medical Center
Summary:
It's long been believed that advancing age leads to broad declines
in our mental abilities. Now new research offers surprisingly good
news by countering this view.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
It's long been believed that advancing age leads to broad declines in
our mental abilities. Now new research from Georgetown University Medical Center offers surprisingly good news by countering this view.


==========================================================================
The findings, published August 19, 2021, in Nature Human Behaviour,
show that two key brain functions, which allow us to attend to new
information and to focus on what's important in a given situation, can
in fact improve in older individuals. These functions underlie critical
aspects of cognition such as memory, decision making, and self-control,
and even navigation, math, language, and reading.

"These results are amazing, and have important consequences for how
we should view aging," says the study's senior investigator, Michael
T. Ullman, PhD, a professor in the Department of Neuroscience, and
Director of Georgetown's Brain and Language Lab.

"People have widely assumed that attention and executive functions decline
with age, despite intriguing hints from some smaller-scale studies that
raised questions about these assumptions," he says. "But the results
from our large study indicate that critical elements of these abilities actually improve during aging, likely because we simply practice these
skills throughout our life." "This is all the more important because
of the rapidly aging population, both in the US and around the world,"
Ullman says. He adds that with further research, it may be possible to deliberately improve these skills as protection against brain decline
in healthy aging and disorders.

The research team, which includes first author Joa~o Veri'ssimo, PhD,
an assistant professor at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, looked at
three separate components of attention and executive function in a group
of 702 participants aged 58 to 98. They focused on these ages since this
is when cognition often changes the most during aging.



==========================================================================
The components they studied are the brain networks involved in alerting, orienting, and executive inhibition. Each has different characteristics
and relies on different brain areas and different neurochemicals and
genes.

Therefore, Ullman and Veri'ssimo reasoned, the networks may also show
different aging patterns.

Alerting is characterized by a state of enhanced vigilance and
preparedness in order to respond to incoming information. Orienting
involves shifting brain resources to a particular location in space. The executivenetwork inhibits distracting or conflicting information,
allowing us to focus on what's important.

"We use all three processes constantly," Veri'ssimo explains. "For
example, when you are driving a car, alerting is your increased
preparedness when you approach an intersection. Orienting occurs when you
shift your attention to an unexpected movement, such as a pedestrian. And executivefunction allows you to inhibit distractions such as birds or billboards so you can stay focused on driving." The study found that
only alerting abilities declined with age. In contrast, both orientingand executive inhibition actually improved.

The researchers hypothesize that because orienting and inhibition are
simply skills that allow people to selectively attend to objects, these
skills can improve with lifelong practice. The gains from this practice
can be large enough to outweigh the underlying neural declines, Ullman
and Veri'ssimo suggest. In contrast, they believe that alerting declines because this basic state of vigilance and preparedness cannot improve
with practice.

"Because of the relatively large number of participants, and because
we ruled out numerous alternative explanations, the findings should be
reliable and so may apply quite broadly," Veri'ssimo says. Moreover,
he explains that "because orienting and inhibitory skills underlie
numerous behaviors, the results have wide-ranging implications."
"The findings not only change our view of how aging affects the mind,
but may also lead to clinical improvements, including for patients with
aging disorders such as Alzheimer's disease," says Ullman.

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
Georgetown_University_Medical_Center. Note: Content may be edited for
style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. John Verssimo, Paul Verhaeghen, Noreen Goldman, Maxine Weinstein,
Michael
T. Ullman. Evidence that ageing yields improvements as well as
declines across attention and executive functions. Nature Human
Behaviour, 2021; DOI: 10.1038/s41562-021-01169-7 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/08/210819113017.htm

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