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Older adulthood can be characterized by various cognitive and affective changes. In general, older adults show declines in creativity and executive functioning. They also score lower in openness to experience, empathy, and many suffer from a paucity of meaningful experiences. Further, depression, pessimism, and suicide can be major concerns for this population. Although currently there are few interventions that can effectively address these changes, recent findings from psychedelic science suggest myriad parallels between the effects of these drugs and the cognitive/affective shifts seen in older adulthood. Studies have shown that psychedelics are associated with enhanced creativity and executive functioning. They can also lead to increases in openness and empathy, and induce personally meaningful experiences. Lastly, psychedelics’ efficacy for treating mood disorders and their role in palliative care are rapidly growing areas of scientific research. In this article, we analyze findings from contemporary psychedelic studies and integrate them with research on cognitive/affective changes in older adulthood to assess whether these drugs have potential to be incorporated into older adult research. We also assess the intuitive follow-up questions of potential mechanisms of action and safety concerns. Findings indicate that psychedelics have effects on a number of cognitive/affective processes that are altered in older adulthood, and are relatively safe when used with professional preparation and supervision. Increased neuroplasticity, neurogenesis, connectedness, and mystical experiences have been argued to underlie cognitive/affective changes. However, further research is needed to overcome current experimental limitations such as generalizability, unstandardized dosages, inadequate controls, and self-selection/experimenter biases.

A variety of attentional and perceptual changes occur in peri-hand space, including increases in visual temporal acuity. These changes in cognition have been related to an increase in magnocellular visual processing. Other magnocellular-related processes have been shown to enhance temporal sensitivity and lead to time overestimation. We hypothesized that a similar slowing of time perception would occur in peri-hand space. To this end, we had participants complete either a temporal bisection task or a verbal time estimation task with their hands near to or far from the test stimuli. Contrary to our predictions, we found no differences in time perception in peri-hand space. We situate our findings within the context of a contemporaneous study by Qi, Wang, He, and Du (2019), which produced conflicting results when using a temporal reproduction task to investigate the same phenomenon. The disparate results might relate to the fragility of peri-hand effects and/or to the tasks tapping into different aspects of time perception. Further research will be needed to fully elucidate the nuances of peri-hand space and temporal processing.

Recent investigations have revealed enhanced processing of information that is presented within hand space. A potential consequence of such enhancement could be that simultaneous processing of information outside of hand space is diminished, but this possibility has yet to be tested. Here, we considered the possibility that the hands can serve as a natural remedy for unwanted interference, by acting as a physical manifestation of the attentional window. Participants performed a flanker task in which they identified a central target letter in the presence of flanking letters that varied in their degrees of compatibility with the target. Participants either held their hands around the target, such that the flankers appeared outside of the hands (but in clear view), or held their hands away from the display, and thus not around any of the stimuli. Flanker interference was markedly reduced when the hands were around the target, and these effects were not attributable to visual differences across the conditions. Collectively, these results indicate that the hands effectively shield attention from visual interference.

Recent research has shown that being able to interact with an object causes it to be perceived as being closer than objects that cannot be interacted with. In the present study, we examined whether that compression of perceived space would be experienced by people who simply observed such interactions by others with no intention of performing the action themselves. Participants judged the distance to targets after observing an actor reach to an otherwise unreachable target with a tool (Experiment 1) or illuminate a distant target with a laser pointer (Experiment 2). Observing either type of interaction caused a compression of perceived space, revealing that a person's perception of space can be altered through mere observation. These results indicate that shared representations between an actor and observer are engaged at the perceptual level easily and perhaps automatically, even in the absence of cooperation or an observer's own intention to interact.

International audience; In this report, we examine whether and how altered aspects of perception and attention near the hands affect one's learning of to-be-remembered visual material. We employed the contextual cuing paradigm of visual learning in two experiments. Participants searched for a target embedded within images of fractals and other complex geometrical patterns while either holding their hands near to or far from the stimuli. When visual features and structural patterns remained constant across to-be-learned images (Exp. 1), no difference emerged between hand postures in the observed rates of learning. However, when to-be-learned scenes maintained structural pattern information but changed in color (Exp. 2), participants exhibited substantially slower rates of learning when holding their hands near the material. This finding shows that learning near the hands is impaired in situations in which common information must be abstracted from visually unique images, suggesting a bias toward detail-oriented processing near the hands.