Georgetown University Medical Center — MedicalXPress — 19 August 2021
New research from Georgetown University Medical Center published in Nature Human Behaviour counters the long-held belief that advancing age leads to broad declines in mental abilities. The findings show that two key brain functions — orienting (shifting attention to particular stimuli) and executive inhibition (filtering out distractions to focus on what’s important) — can actually improve in older individuals. These functions underlie critical aspects of cognition including memory, decision making, self-control, navigation, mathematics, language and reading. The study looked at 702 participants aged 58 to 98 years.
The three attention and executive function components studied were: alerting (a state of enhanced vigilance and preparedness in order to respond to incoming information); orienting (shifting brain resources to a particular location in space); and executive inhibition (suppressing distracting or conflicting information). The study found that only alerting abilities declined with age. In contrast, both orienting and executive inhibition actually improved. The researchers hypothesize that because orienting and inhibition are skills that allow people to selectively attend to objects, these skills can improve with lifelong practice, and the gains from this practice can be large enough to outweigh underlying neural decline. “These results are amazing, and have important consequences for how we should view aging,” said senior investigator Michael T. Ullman, PhD, Professor of Neuroscience and Director of Georgetown’s Brain and Language Lab. “The findings not only change our view of how aging affects the mind, but may also lead to clinical improvements, including for patients with aging disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.”