Article archive / August 1, 2014
Originally published: . Volume 5, No. 12. Source pages: 8.
Tulane Associate Professor, Dr. Edward Golob, and head of the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab in the Psychology Department, will present “Control of Auditory Spatial Attention in Aging.” This will be part of the panel for the Thursday symposium, “Successful Aging––From Molecules to Mental Exercise.”
Dr. Golob and his researchers study important aspects of hearing and how auditory processing is affected by attention, short- term memory, and other aspects of perception and action.
“Our studies focus on age differences in brain networks that regulate attention. We are testing the idea that age differences in very basic aspects of attention are expressed in a variety of cognitive functions that change with age,” according to his site.
This year at APA, Dr. Golob will present findings from some of his lab’s studies in both younger and older healthy adults.
He examined the auditory event-related potentials as a function of voluntary attention to regions of space and compared individual differences in working memory capacity, one measure of the effectiveness of managing attention and short-term memory.
He notes that the results suggest that aging is accompanied by a more disffuse allocation of attention over space, which may indicate a mechanism for reduced cognitive control in normal aging. The modulation of neurophysiological age differences by working memory capacity may reflect cognitive reserve, the researchers note.
The study of working memory capacity may provide links between basic attention control and higher- level cognition which is important in daily life.
Dr. Golob is also a member of the Tulane Center for Aging, a university-wide center that aims to gather multidisciplinary resources to help the graying population.
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