NeWMaBIL · Neural correlates of working memory control in aged bilinguals
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2016-01-01 → 2017-12-31
- EU contribution
- €165,599
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Neural correlates of working memory control in aged bilinguals
The European population is getting older. This fact enhances the cases of degenerative processes, such as Alzheimer’s disease. The process of ageing exerts changes in the functionality of our brain, and in turn in our cognition. Recent data predict that he 20% of Europeans will be 65 or over by 2025. In this context, describing the cognitive features, the neural patterns and the factors that contribute to slow-down cognitive depletion in aging becomes necessary for diagnosis and for the design of interventions. The human brain contains the ability to tolerate age-related changes and disease-related pathologies without developing clear clinical symptoms. This capacity constitutes the well-known concept of cognitive reserve (CR) and shows the potentiality of the neural architecture to be shaped by experience. The educational level, occupational attainment, enrollment in leisure activities and, recently, bilingualism, have been proposed as proxies of CR. Working memory and attention are interrelated cognitive skills which are affected by aging. Attention takes an important role since allows us to select the relevant information and inhibit the irrelevant information of an ongoing task. Cognitive functions are represented by the dynamical communication of distributed oscillatory neural activity of the brain. Studying the oscillatory patterns of the ongoing neural activity allows us to investigate the cognitive features of aging. The overall objectives of this project were to study how aging affects the neural patterns of attention during working memory and study how these patterns relate with the individual cognitive reserve (including bilingual abilities) and cognitive capacities.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Identification of factors that slow down cognitive depletion in ageing is today one of the main objectives of the aged society. Within the concept of cognitive reserve (CR), bilingualism has evidenced to shape cognition by enhancing the capacity of cognitive control (CgCnt). CgCnt and working memory (WM) capacities are strongly interrelated systems which are depleted by ageing. However, the exploration of how bilingualism shapes cognition in old populations is scarce and recently subjected to debate. Under this framework, sensitive approaches (such as the exploration of the neural oscillatory activity) that enable objective investigation of the effects of bilingualism on cognitive ageing are necessary. Neural oscillations represent the mechanisms responsible for cognition. Furthermore, they offer a direct measure of the cognitive architecture and of any reorganizational process accounting in the brain by factors as bilingualism. Nevertheless, the neural code of WM control in old bilinguals has not been explored yet. The current project aims to investigate, with magnetoencephalography (MEG), the neural correlates of WM control in young and old adult bilingual individuals. Resulting data will open a window into the role of bilingualism on the neural architecture of the working brain.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- STICHTING RADBOUD UNIVERSITEIT · NijmegenCoordinatorNetherlands
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union