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A Study On The Executive Function Of50-89Years Old Normal Middle-aged And Elderly People In Shanghai Area

Posted on:2013-04-06Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:J Y ZhuFull Text:PDF
GTID:2256330374467685Subject:Development and educational psychology
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With the process of population aging, the researches on aging are rising. In the past20years, executive function (EF for short), as one of the important concepts in the field of cognitive aging, has become the focus and front in researches on cognitive development. Executive function is defined as a high-level cognitive ability that controls and coordinates the cognitive processes, produces intended-orientation and effective actions, thus makes cognitive system to ensure a flexible, optimized way to achieve specific goals. It is an attractive and hot topic, since the decline or impairment of executive function may have a wide range of influence on other cognitive tasks’ performance.One hundred and twenty-seven adults between50and89years of age are recruited in the present study. The executive function is evaluated through nine tasks including anti-cue task, color word Stroop task, number Stroop task, number running memory task, word keep track task, color dot n-back task, local-global shifting task, small-big shifting task and gender-emotion shifting task which are considered to tap each corresponding target executive function. The unity and diversity of executive function in middle-aged and elderly people is studied with latent variable approach, and the developmental characteristics of it is also described to explore the normal aging of executive function. The results indicate that:1. The diversity of executive function (inhibition of prepotent response, memory updating, and mental set shifting) exists in normal aging, and the three components are considered as both relatively independent and complicated related functions.2. The age and educational level influence the aging of executive function independently, the effect of age is negative, and the effect of educational level is positive. Besides, the effect of gender is not significant.3. The ability of executive function declines while aging. Furthermore, the tasks tapping the same component show the "all-or-none effect", but the different component shows the different aging trajectory. The ability of inhibition and shifting keeps declining strikingly during the whole aging period, but the ability of updating has a turning point in it’s aging trajectory at the age of young-elderly people which guides a dramatically decline in the later time.4. The educational level is an important and widespread supportive factor for executive function, that is to say, the emergence of education’s positive effect does not depend on specific task or specific age. But the three components show the various sensitivities to the impact of educational level, and updating is the most sensitive one.5. The different components of executive function of participants with different educational levels display unlike developmental models with age. The inhibition and updating show "parallel model", and the shifting shows "protect model"...
Keywords/Search Tags:cognitive aging, executive function, inhibition, updating, shifting, educational level
PDF Full Text Request
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