Andy’s Quick Hits (161): Young brains lack the wisdom of their elders

Always keen in my ageing to show that my brain beats those of those smart young whippersnappers, this study nicely supports this. The researchers note that older brains are not slower but wiser which enables a comparable level of performance — good to know — but how did they study this?

They studied the planning and execution of language pairing tasks — but the researchers changed the rules (without telling the participants) part way through the task to see how respondents reacted and this was done in brain scanners to identify brain regions that activated or not.

In the younger participants the brain was more responsive to negative reinforcement i.e. making mistakes. In older participants this took a while to activate — they noted that “it is as though the older brain is more impervious to criticism and more confident than the young brain”. Good to know!

Reference:
Ruben Martins, France Simard, Jean-Sebastien Provost, and Oury Monchi.
Changes in Regional and Temporal Patterns of Activity Associated with Aging during the Performance of a Lexical Set-Shifting Task.
Cereb. Cortex, August 24, 2011
DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhr222

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