Description
- Abstract:
- Human brain processing declines with aging and reveals cognitive and perceptual impairments. Previous researches on cognitive neuroscience in aging have provided evidence on the relationship in cognitive declinations with distinctive brain activation patterns compared with younger adults. However, it remains unclear how the course of aging affects brain plasticity. Is an aging brain still plastic? If so, can older people recover age-associated impaired functions through plasticity? In order to answer such questions, I applied visual perceptual learning (VPL) in my dissertation research. VPL refers to long-term improvement on a visual task and is regarded as a manifestation of brain plasticity. Several studies have demonstrated that repetitive and intensive practice leads to enhance impaired visual functions in younger adults, and the learning is associated with the functional activation changes in the early visual area V1. My research focuses on whether VPL can be acquired by older adults in order to enhance impaired visual ability. If it can, what is the underlying neuronal mechanism of VPL in aging? Although some studies suggest that an older brain tends to have a degraded capability of learning and plasticity, my dissertation demonstrated that older people are able to improve their task performance through intensive practice, thereby providing evidence of visual plasticity. More importantly, unlike younger adults, VPL is associated with structural changes in the early visual area in older adults. The advanced morphological analysis indicated that the cortical areal size of the early visual area V3 is associated with the magnitude of VPL improvement. Finally, my research demonstrated that the aging brain could be more plastic than the younger brain due to less inhibition from higher cortical areas, thereby enhancing visual perception especially when exposed to salient task-irrelevant signals. These results provide evidence of plasticity in the visual system in older adults and further suggest that visual plasticity has different underlying neural mechanisms between older and younger adults.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2014)
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Citation
Chang, Li-Hung,
"The Effects of Aging on Visual Perceptual Learning and Plasticity"
(2014).
Cognitive Sciences Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z09G5K5V
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Cognitive Sciences Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Cognitive Sciences department....