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Vocabulary Knowledge is Relatively Resilient to Aging: Due Arcuate Fasciculus Patterning?
Vocabulary knowledge exhibits relatively limited decline with age in comparison to many other cognitive functions. We examined whether this relative resilience to aging could be due to the organization of the arcuate fasciculus, a fiber tract where white matter microstructure predicts reading skill development. We show in the Journal of Neuroscience that arcuate fasciculus morphology…
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Visual System Activity When Listening to Speech: Distracting or Helpful?
Aging is often associated with increased distractibility that may arise from a failure to adequately suppress the processing of irrelevant sensory information. In our recent Cerebral Cortex paper, we show that decreasing word intelligibility was associated with increasing visual cortex activity in younger, middle-aged, and older adults. In addition, age was related visual cortex activity:…
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Changes in Cerebellar and Frontal Cortex Predict Age-related Changes in Cognitive Processing Speed
The most consistent and pronounced factor that affects the cognitive abilities of older adults is a decline in processing speed, or the rate at which people can perform a task. Links between processing speed and changes in frontal lobe cortex, which appear to be mediated in part by cerebral vessel disease, have been reported previously.…