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Finalist in the 2020 PROSE Awards Brain aging—and human aging more broadly—has long been seen as a process of slow, and inevitable, deterioration and decline. Today, this view has been challenged with research demonstrating a more complex set of changes - growth, decline, adaptation, selectivity, and reorganization - in brain structure and function across adulthood. In fact, research in both behavioral and brain science shows that not all cognitive processes decline with age, that in fact some improve over the course of adulthood, and those that improve can often compensate for those that decline. It turns out that the aging brain is very much alive, a remarkable example of life's ability to survive and adapt in increasingly challenging environments. Chapters in this multidisciplinary volume examine structural and related functional changes in the aging brain, and the neural mechanisms underlying such changes; age-related changes in learning and episodic memory; risk and protective factors; and the assessment and prevention of cognitive decline.

In this book, top scientists from a variety of fields investigate the development of executive function (EF), a term that encompasses a range of mental processes that together regulate our social behavior and our cognitive and emotional well-being.

As humans, we self-regulate whenever we adapt our emotions and actions to situational requirements and to internalized social standards and norms. Self-regulation encompasses skills such as paying attention, inhibiting reflexive actions, and delaying gratification. We need self-regulation for navigating in the social world (e.g., when we inhibit revealing a secret, even though it is tempting to tell it), academic life (e.g., when we study for the test, even though we would prefer to watch our favorite TV show), and much more -- indeed, in every aspect of life. While both environmental and genetic factors have direct, long-lasting influences on an individual's ability to self-regulate, these factors also interact with each other in critical ways. On one hand, environmental factors such as parental attachment can shape the epigenetics and the expression of the individual genotype; on the other hand, gene variations may increase vulnerability to certain environmental pathogens. This book presents self-regulation as a crucial link between genetic predisposition, early experience, and later adult functioning in society. Individual chapters examine what self-regulation is, how it functions, how genetic and environmental factors influence its development, how it affects social and academic competence in childhood and adulthood, what pathologies can emerge if it is under-developed, and how it might be fostered in children. Part of the Human Brain Development Series, edited by Michael Posner, this book will appeal to developmental psychologists, developmental neuroscientists, educational psychologists, and educational practitioners interested in the link between brain sciences and education.

Developmental theorists have long speculated that emotion and cognition are inseparable components of the developmental process. Some even suggest that the two components are fully integrated by school age. Yet, despite considerable theoretical work describing this interaction, relatively little empirical work has been conducted on the subject. This volume addresses the codevelopment of emotional and cognitive processes by integrating theoretical and empirical work on these processes. The first part of the book demonstrates the codependence of emotional and cognitive processes, noting that both processes are clearly necessary for successful regulation of thought and behavior and that children with early adjustment difficulties often have deficits in both types of processing. The second part considers possible neurological and genetic mechanisms for the emotion-cognition link. Finally, the last part explores implications for clinical and educational research, highlighting atypical emotional and cognitive processing and its effect on adjustment in academic and social settings.

Aging and Cognition takes an interdisciplinary look at cognitive aging---how it happens and how to study it. The first part of the book explores methods for measuring cognitive change, including how to study cohort effects. The second part explores the social and psychological factors associated with cognitive aging. And, finally, a brief concluding section explores how to use research findings to improve the everyday functioning of adults---a challenging task because everyday functioning relies on complex cognitive tasks, while most cognitive research measures only basic cognitive tasks. This book is suitable for cognitive psychologists, experimental psychologists, developmental psychologists, geropsychologists, neuropsychologists, and graduate students in cognitive and developmental psychology courses and their professors.