Cognitive Neuroscience of Aging

Until very recently, what we knew about the neural basis of cognitive ageing was based on two disciplines that had very little contact with each other. Whereas the neuroscience of ageing investigated the effects of aging on the brain independently of age-related changes in cognition, the cognitive psychology of ageing investigated the effects of ageing on cognition independently of age related changes in the brain. Because an increasing number of studies have focused on the relationships between cognitive ageing and cerebral ageing, these two disciplines have begun to interact. This rapidly growing body of research has come to constitute a new discipline: cognitive neuroscience of ageing. The goal of this book is to introduce this new discipline at a level that is useful to both professionals and students in cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, neuropsychology, neurology, and related areas. The book is divided into four main sections.
The first section describes non-invasive measures of cerebral ageing, including structural (eg volumetric MRI), chemical, (eg dopamine PET), electrophysiological (eg ERP's), and themodynamic measures (eg fMRI), and discusses how they can be linked to behavioural measures of cognitive ageing. The second section reviews evidence for the effects of ageing on neural activity during different cognitive functions, including perception and attention, use of imagery, working memory, long-term memory, and prospective memory. The third section focuses on clinical and applied concerns, such as the distinction between health ageing and ageing with Alzheimer's disease, and the use of cognitive training to ameliorate age-related cognitive decline. The final section describes theories that relate cognitive and cerebral ageing, including models accounting for functional neuroimaging evidence and models supported by computer simulations. Taken together, the chapters in this volume provide the first unified and comprehensive overview of the new discipline of cognitive neuroscience of ageing.