The Eckert Laboratory

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: [...]

Older adults experience slowed processing speed and the severity of slowed processing speed is a strong predictor of age-related cognitive decline and independence.  In our recent manuscript in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience we review the structural changes observed in brains of older adults that occur with slowed processing speed.  The most consistently observed structural [...]

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. [...]

Changes in auditory temporal processing are thought to be one reason why older adults have difficulty recognizing speech, especially in difficult listening conditions. Dr. Kelly Harris reports in the journal Hearing Research that changes in auditory temporal processing can be explained, in part, by changes in cognitive processing speed. Processing speed is the rate at [...]