The Influence Of Bilingual Experience On Cognitive Control In The Aged

Cognitive control is an important cognitive ability of human beings.It includes three sub components: response suppression,inhibitory control and task switching.It is indispensable for human survival.Nowadays,more and more people in the world have mastered bilingual ability.Consequently,more and more attention has been paid to bilingual experience and its advantage effect.At present,many psychological research evidences show bilingual experience can promote different sub components of individual cognitive control system.At the same time,the impact of different emotional stimuli on cognitive control system has not yet drawn a unified conclusion.Therefore,on the basis of previous studies,this study started with different emotional conditions to explore the influence of ethnic bilingual experience on different sub components of cognitive control under different emotional backgrounds,and revealed the differences and characteristics of cognitive control ability under different language experiences and emotional conditions.This study is based on the face paradigm of Bialystok and Viswanathan(2009),consisting of two experiments.Experiment 1 examined the impact of bilingual experience of ethnic minorities on response suppression and task switching of the aged.Different emotional and interference conditions were set in the experiment.The subjects were required to complete the task of position judgment according to the task rules.At the same time,the accuracy and reaction time of the subjects were recorded in the experiment.Experiment 2 examined the influence of bilingual experience of ethnic minorities on inhibitory control and task switching of the aged.Like Experiment 1,different emotional and interference conditions were set in Experiment2,the subjects were required to complete the task of position judgment according to the task rules,and the accuracy and reaction time of the subjects in the experiment were recorded.Experiment 1 found that reaction inhibition was influenced by language experience,and the reaction time of the ethnic bilingual aged was significantly faster than the reaction time of the Han monolingual aged.The cognitive control ability of the aged was affected by different emotional stimulations.The reaction time of the aged under negative emotional conditions was significantly slower than the reaction time under positive emotional conditions.Emotion interacts with response suppression and task switching: under the condition of switching and negative emotional stimulation,the accuracy of inhibition test was significantly higher than that of non inhibition test;The ability of emotion regulation was affected by bilingual experience,and the reaction time of the ethnic bilingual aged was significantly faster than the reaction time of the Han monolingual aged.Experiment 2 also found that different emotional stimulate affected the cognitive control ability of the aged;the ability of emotion regulation was affected by bilingual experience.In addition,inhibitory control was affected by language experience and the reaction time of the ethnic bilingual aged was significantly faster than the reaction time of the Han monolingual aged.To sum up,the results of this study showed that:(1)language experience has an impact on cognitive control and bilingual experience of ethnic minorities promotes individual ability of response suppression and inhibitory control,but it is not found that bilingual experience of ethnic minorities has a positive impact on task switching of the aged.(2)There is a negative emotional bias effect in the elderly.The Reaction time of the aged under negative emotional condition is longer than that under positive emotional condition.(3)The long-term experience of language switching can help ethnic bilinguals transfer the "bilingual advantage" effect to the field of emotion regulation in their daily life,and make ethnic bilinguals have better emotion regulation ability.