Cognitive Science

The latest breakthroughs, innovations, and cool happenings at the cutting edge of the world of cognitive science. Updated daily.

Cognitive Reserve Is Not Associated With Hippocampal Microstructure in Older Adults Without Dementia

Objective: Mean Diffusivity (MD) as measured by diffusion tensor imaging can be used to detect microstructural alterations of the brain’s gray matter (GM). A previous study found that higher education, which is a proxy for cognitive reserve (CR), was related to decreased hippocampal MD in middle-aged healthy adults, indicating decreased microstructural damage in more educated […]

Published on March 10, 2020

Loss of Sensitivity to Rewards by Dopamine Neurons May Underlie Age-Related Increased Probability Discounting

Normative aging is known to affect how decisions are made in risky situations. Although important individual variability exists, on average, aging is accompanied by greater risk aversion. Here the behavioral and neural mechanisms of greater risk aversion were examined in young and old rats trained on an instrumental probability discounting task. Consistent with the literature, […]

Published on March 6, 2020

Resting State Glucose Utilization and Adult Reading Test Performance

Adult reading tests (ART) have been widely used in both research and clinical settings as a measure of premorbid cognitive abilities or cognitive reserve. However, the neural substrates underlying ART performance are largely unknown. Furthermore, it has not yet been examined whether the neural substrates of ART performance reflect the cortical regions associated with premorbid […]

Published on March 5, 2020