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Personality traits have been reported to predict difficulties in performing instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) in old age, such as preparing meals or shopping. However, little is known about the reciprocal effects on personality. In this study, we examined bidirectional relationships between personality traits and the capacity to perform IADL using four waves of longitudinal data from 3540 older adults (aged 65 years and older) from the Health and Retirement Study. We applied a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model to separate between- and within-person effects across time and compared it to a traditional cross-lagged panel model. At the between-person level, higher neuroticism and lower conscientiousness were associated with more IADL limitations. Within individuals across time, increases in neuroticism and decreases in conscientiousness and extraversion were associated with increases in IADL limitations 4 years later. In contrast, increases in IADL limitations only predicted increases in neuroticism and decreases in extraversion. These results indicate that some personality traits affect and are affected by limitations in functional capacities in old age. Results of the within-person model build a strong foundation for future personality interventions as a pathway to maintain high functioning in old age.

Worldwide, approximately 22% of all individuals aged 50 years and older are currently estimated to fall somewhere on the Alzheimer’s disease (AD) continuum, which can be roughly divided into preclinical AD, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and AD dementia. While episodic memory loss (among other aspects) is typically required for a diagnosis of AD dementia, MCI is said to have occurred when cognitive impairment (including memory loss) is worse than expected for the person’s age but not enough to be classified as dementia. On the other hand, preclinical AD can currently only be detected using biomarkers; clinical symptoms are not apparent using traditional neuropsychological tests. The main aim of the current paper was to explore the possibility of a test which could distinguish preclinical AD from normal aging. Recent scientific evidence suggests that the Famous Faces Test (FFT) could differentiate preclinical AD from normal aging up to 5 years before a clinical AD diagnosis. Problematic with existing FFTs is the selection of stimulus material. Faces famous in a specific country and a specific decade might not be equally famous for individuals in another country or indeed for people of different ages. The current article describes how famous faces were systematically selected and chosen for the Dutch older (60+) population using five steps. The goal was to design and develop short versions of the FFT for Dutch older adults of equivalent mean difficulty. In future work, these nine parallel versions will be necessary for (a) cross-sectional comparison as well as subsequent longitudinal assessment of cognitively normal and clinical groups and (b) creating personalized norms for the normal aged controls that could be used to compare performance within individuals with clinical diagnoses. The field needs a simple, cognitive test which can distinguish the earliest stages of the dementia continuum from normal aging.

The engagement in cognitively stimulating activities has been found to be associated with slower rates of cognitive decline in old age. In which type of activities people engage in may depend on their personality traits, which thus might have an impact on later cognitive fitness. To study these potential links, we examined the associations between Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Openness; different types of leisure activities (e.g., social, mental, physical); and cognitive ability levels and decline in older adults. Analyses were based on a sample of young-old (60-72 years old; n = 1,609) and old-old (78 years or older; n = 1,085) adults from the Swedish National Study on Aging and Care in Kungsholmen, who participated in up to five repeated measurements of cognitive abilities spanning 12 years. We used latent growth curve models to estimate cognitive levels and decline, as well as the correlations with initial personality trait levels and leisure activity engagement. In both groups, lower Neuroticism, higher Extraversion, and higher Openness levels were moderately associated with stronger engagement in all types of activities. Lower Neuroticism, higher Extraversion, and a more activity lifestyle were weakly to moderately associated with slower cognitive decline in the old-old age group. There, personality traits and activities explained 9.3% of the variance in cognitive decline after controlling for age, sex, education, and chronic diseases (which explained 9.0%). Taken together, this study provides further evidence for the connection between personality traits, activity engagement, and later cognitive decline in old age.

Worldwide, approximately 22% of all individuals aged 50 years and older are currently estimated to fall somewhere on the Alzheimer's disease (AD) continuum, which can be roughly divided into preclinical AD, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and AD dementia. While episodic memory loss (among other aspects) is typically required for a diagnosis of AD dementia, MCI is said to have occurred when cognitive impairment (including memory loss) is worse than expected for the person's age but not enough to be classified as dementia. On the other hand, preclinical AD can currently only be detected using biomarkers; clinical symptoms are not apparent using traditional neuropsychological tests. The main aim of the current paper was to explore the possibility of a test which could distinguish preclinical AD from normal aging. Recent scientific evidence suggests that the Famous Faces Test (FFT) could differentiate preclinical AD from normal aging up to 5 years before a clinical AD diagnosis. Problematic with existing FFTs is the selection of stimulus material. Faces famous in a specific country and a specific decade might not be equally famous for individuals in another country or indeed for people of different ages. The current article describes how famous faces were systematically selected and chosen for the Dutch older (60+) population using five steps. The goal was to design and develop short versions of the FFT for Dutch older adults of equivalent mean difficulty. In future work, these nine parallel versions will be necessary for (a) cross-sectional comparison as well as subsequent longitudinal assessment of cognitively normal and clinical groups and (b) creating personalized norms for the normal aged controls that could be used to compare performance within individuals with clinical diagnoses. The field needs a simple, cognitive test which can distinguish the earliest stages of the dementia continuum from normal aging.

It has been suggested that volunteering leads to increases in well-being, particularly in older and retiring adults, and that volunteering could be used as a public health intervention to increase well-being. However, the causal relationship has been questioned. We investigated the association between voluntary work and life satisfaction in a bivariate dual-change score model, using 4 years of longitudinal data from 1,123 participants from the Health, Aging and Retirement Transitions in Sweden (HEARTS) study. Both the frequency of volunteering and the level of life satisfaction increased across the retirement transition. However, baseline life satisfaction and volunteering were only marginally associated. Further, the coupling parameters suggest that higher levels of volunteering were followed by decreases in life satisfaction and that higher levels of life satisfaction were followed by increases in volunteering. These findings suggest that increasing levels of volunteering might not be a fruitful strategy for improving life satisfaction for all older adults-if people engage too much in voluntary work, it might even be detrimental for their life satisfaction. More research is needed to better understand when and for whom increased levels of volunteering might have positive effects on life satisfaction., Funding Agencies|International Postdoctoral Grant from the Swedish Research Council (VR)Swedish Research Council [DNR 2016-00507]; German Research FoundationGerman Research Foundation (DFG) [441444293]; FORTE (Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare) [DNR 2013-2291]

Foreign language learning in older age has been proposed as a promising avenue for combatting age-related cognitive decline. We tested this hypothesis in a randomized controlled study in a sample of 160 healthy older participants (aged 65-75 years) who were randomized to 11 weeks of either language learning or relaxation training. Participants in the language learning condition obtained some basic knowledge in the new language (Italian), but between-groups differences in improvements on latent factors of verbal intelligence, spatial intelligence, working memory, item memory, or associative memory were negligible. We argue that this is not due to either poor measurement, low course intensity, or low statistical power, but that basic studies in foreign languages in older age are likely to have no or trivially small effects on cognitive abilities. We place this in the context of the cognitive training and engagement literature and conclude that while foreign language learning may expand the behavioral repertoire, it does little to improve cognitive processing abilities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Older adults show relatively minor age-related decline in memory for single items, while their memory for associations is markedly reduced. Inter-individual differences in memory function in older adults are substantial but the neurobiological underpinnings of such differences are not well understood. In particular, the relative importance of inter-individual differences in the medio-temporal lobe (MTL) and the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) for associative and item recognition in older adults is still ambiguous. We therefore aimed to first establish the distinction between inter-individual differences in associative memory (recollection-based) performance and item memory (familiarity-based) performance in older adults and subsequently link these two constructs to differences in cortical thickness in the MTL and lateral PFC regions, in a latent structural equation modelling framework. To this end, a sample of 160 older adults (65–75 years old) performed three intentional item-associative memory tasks, of which a subsample (n ​= ​72) additionally had cortical thickness measures in MTL and PFC regions of interest available. The results provided support for a distinction between familiarity-based item memory and recollection-based associative memory performance in older adults. Cortical thickness in the ventro-medial prefrontal cortex was positively correlated with associative recognition performance, above and beyond any relationship between item recognition performance and cortical thickness in the same region and between associative recognition performance and brain structure in the MTL (parahippocampus). The findings highlight the relative importance of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in allowing for intentional recollection-based associative memory functioning in older adults.

Previous research shows that associative memory declines more than item memory in aging. Although the underlying mechanisms of this selective impairment remain poorly understood, animal and human data suggest that dopaminergic modulation may be particularly relevant for associative binding. We investigated the influence of dopamine (DA) receptor genes on item and associative memory in a population-based sample of older adults (n = 525, aged 60 years), assessed with a face-scene item associative memory task. The effects of single-nucleotide polymorphisms of DA D1 (DRD1; rs4532), D2 (DRD2/ANKK1/Taq1A; rs1800497), and D3 (DRD3/Ser9Gly; rs6280) receptor genes were examined and combined into a single genetic score. Individuals carrying more beneficial alleles, presumably associated with higher DA receptor efficacy (DRD1 C allele; DRD2 A2 allele; DRD3 T allele), performed better on associative memory than persons with less beneficial genotypes. There were no effects of these genes on item memory or other cognitive measures, such as working memory, executive functioning, fluency, and perceptual speed, indicating a selective association between DA genes and associative memory. By contrast, genetic risk for Alzheimer disease (AD) was associated with worse item and associative memory, indicating adverse effects of APOE epsilon 4 and a genetic risk score for AD (PICALM, BIN1, CLU) on episodic memory in general. Taken together, our results suggest that DA may be particularly important for associative memory, whereas AD-related genetic variations may influence overall episodic memory in older adults without dementia.

Evidence from neuroimaging studies suggests a critical role of hippocampus and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) in associative relative to item encoding. Here, we investigated similarities and differences in functional brain correlates for associative and item memory as a function of encoding instruction. Participants received either incidental (animacy judgments) or intentional encoding instructions while fMRI was employed during the encoding of associations and items. In a subsequent recognition task, memory performance of participants receiving intentional encoding instructions was higher compared with those receiving incidental encoding instructions. Furthermore, participants remembered more items than associations, regardless of encoding instruction. Greater brain activation in the left anterior hippocampus was observed for intentionally compared with incidentally encoded associations, although activity in this region was not modulated by the type of instruction for encoded items. Furthermore, greater activity in the left anterior hippocampus and left IFG was observed during intentional associative compared with item encoding. The same regions were related to subsequent memory of intentionally encoded associations and were thus task relevant. Similarly, connectivity of the anterior hippocampus to the right superior temporal lobe and IFG was uniquely linked to subsequent memory of intentionally encoded associations. Our study demonstrates the differential involvement of anterior hippocampus in intentional relative to incidental associative encoding. This finding likely reflects that the intent to remember triggers a specific binding process accomplished by this region.

The two-component framework of episodic memory (EM) development posits that the contributions of medial temporal lobe (MTL) and prefrontal cortex (PFC) to successful encoding differ across the lifespan. To test the framework's hypotheses, we compared subsequent memory effects (SME) of 10-12 year-old children, younger adults, and older adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Memory was probed by cued recall, and SME were defined as regional activation differences during encoding between subsequently correctly recalled versus omitted items. In MTL areas, children's SME did not differ in magnitude from those of younger and older adults. In contrast, children's SME in PFC were weaker than the corresponding SME in younger and older adults, in line with the hypothesis that PFC contributes less to successful encoding in childhood. Differences in SME between younger and older adults were negligible. The present results suggest that, among individuals with high memory functioning, the neural circuitry contributing to successful episodic encoding is reorganized from middle childhood to adulthood. Successful episodic encoding in later adulthood, however, is characterized by the ability to maintain the activation patterns that emerged in young adulthood.

Associative memory involves binding two or more items into a coherent memory episode. Relative to memory for single items, associative memory declines greatly in aging. However, older individuals vary substantially in their ability to memorize associative information. Although functional studies link associative memory to the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and prefrontal cortex (PFC), little is known about how volumetric differences in MTL and PFC might contribute to individual differences in associative memory. We investigated regional gray-matter volumes related to individual differences in associative memory in a sample of healthy older adults (n = 54; age = 60 years). To differentiate item from associative memory, participants intentionally learned face-scene picture pairs before performing a recognition task that included single faces, scenes, and face-scene pairs. Gray-matter volumes were analyzed using voxel-based morphometry region-of-interest (ROI) analyses. To examine volumetric differences specifically for associative memory, item memory was controlled for in the analyses. Behavioral results revealed large variability in associative memory that mainly originated from differences in false-alarm rates. Moreover, associative memory was independent of individuals' ability to remember single items. Older adults with better associative memory showed larger gray-matter volumes primarily in regions of the left and right lateral PFC. These findings provide evidence for the importance of PFC in intentional learning of associations, likely because of its involvement in organizational and strategic processes that distinguish older adults with good from those with poor associative memory.

Prospective memory performance follows an inverted U-shaped function across the lifespan. Findings on the relative contribution of purely prospective memory and retrospective memory processes within prospective memory to this trajectory are scarce and inconclusive. We analyzed age-related differences in prospective memory performance across the lifespan in a cross-sectional design including six age groups (N = 99, 7–83 years) and investigated possible mechanisms by experimentally disentangling the relative contributions of retrospective memory and purely prospective memory processes. Results confirmed the inverted U-shaped function of prospective memory performance across the lifespan. A significant interaction between process type and age group was observed indicating differential relative contributions of retrospective memory and purely prospective memory processes on the development of prospective memory performance. Our results showed that mainly the pure prospective memory processes within prospective memory lead to lower prospective memory performance in young children and old adults. Moreover, the relative contributions of the retrospective memory and purely prospective memory processes are not uniform at both ends of the lifespan, i.e., in later adulthood the purely prospective memory processes seem to determine performance to an even greater extent than in childhood. Nevertheless, age effects were also observed in the retrospective component which thus contributed to the prospective memory performance differences between the age groups.