0000000000195308
AUTHOR
Michael Falkenstein
Multitasking in aging: ERP correlates of dual-task costs in young versus low, intermediate, and high performing older adults
Abstract With large inter-individual variability, older adults show a decline in cognitive performance in dual-task situations. Differences in attentional processes, working memory, response selection, and general speed of information processing have been discussed as potential sources of this decline and its between-subject variability. In comparison to young subjects (n = 36, mean age: 25 years), we analyzed the performance of a large group of healthy elderly subjects (n = 138, mean age: 70 years) in a conflicting dual-task situation (PRP paradigm). Based on their dual-task costs (DTCs), the older participants were clustered in three groups of high, medium, and low performing elderly. DTC…
Stroop task performance across the lifespan: High cognitive reserve in older age is associated with enhanced proactive and reactive interference control
Abstract Susceptibility to interference increases with age but there is large inter-individual variability in interference control in older adults due to a number of biological and environmental factors. The present study aims at analyzing behavior and ERPs in a Stroop interference task with increasing difficulty in a sample of 246 young, middle-aged and healthy old participants. The old age group was divided into three subgroups based on performance scores. The results show a gradual performance reduction with increasing age and task difficulty. However, old high performers reached a performance level comparable to middle-aged subjects. The contingent negative variation (CNV) reflecting pr…
Genotyping NAT2 with only two SNPs (rs1041983 and rs1801280) outperforms the tagging SNP rs1495741 and is equivalent to the conventional 7-SNP NAT2 genotype
Genotyping N-acetyltransferase 2 (NAT2) is of high relevance for individualized dosing of antituberculosis drugs and bladder cancer epidemiology. In this study we compared a recently published tagging single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) (rs1495741) to the conventional 7-SNP genotype (G191A, C282T, T341C, C481T, G590A, A803G and G857A haplotype pairs) and systematically analysed if novel SNP combinations outperform the latter. For this purpose, we studied 3177 individuals by PCR and phenotyped 344 individuals by the caffeine test. Although the tagSNP and the 7-SNP genotype showed a high degree of correlation (R=0.933, P0.0001) the 7-SNP genotype nevertheless outperformed the tagging SNP wit…