Biomedical subjects

Meredith Minear

Publications and source records attributed to Meredith Minear.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Memory beliefs and function in fibromyalgia patients.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to investigate memory beliefs and their relationship to actual memory function in fibromyalgia (FM) patients. METHODS: Twenty-three FM patients, 23 age- and education-matched controls, and 22 older controls completed the Metamemory in Adulthood (MIA) questionnaire, which assessed beliefs about seven aspects of memory function. Group differences on the seven scales were assessed, and scores on the capacity scale were correlated with objective memory performance. RESULTS: FM patients reported lower memory capacity and more memory deterioration than did either control group. Patients reported lower control or self-efficacy over memory, higher achievement motivation, higher strategy use, and higher anxiety about memory than age-matched controls did. Among the patients, perceived capacity, achievement motivation, and self-efficacy were significantly correlated with objective memory performance on a recall task. CONCLUSION: FM patients' complaints about memory function have some accuracy.

Achievement↗

PubMed2005

Aging and the neural correlates of successful picture encoding: frontal activations compensate for decreased medial-temporal activity.

We investigated the hypothesis that increased prefrontal activations in older adults are compensatory for decreases in medial-temporal activations that occur with age. Because scene encoding engages both hippocampal and prefrontal sites, we examined incidental encoding of scenes by 14 young and 13 older adults in a subsequent memory paradigm using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Behavioral results indicated that there were equivalent numbers of remembered and forgotten items, which did not vary as a function of age. In an fMRI analysis subtracting forgotten items from remembered items, younger and older adults both activated inferior frontal and lateral occipital regions bilaterally; however, older adults showed less activation than young adults in the left and right parahippocampus and more activation than young adults in the middle frontal cortex. Moreover, correlations between inferior frontal and parahippocampal activity were significantly negative for old but not young, suggesting that those older adults who showed the least engagement of the parahippocampus activated inferior frontal areas the most. Because the analyses included only the unique activations associated with remembered items, these data suggest that prefrontal regions could serve a compensatory role for declines in medial-temporal activations with age.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Aging reduces neural specialization in ventral visual cortex.

The present study investigated whether neural structures become less functionally differentiated and specialized with age. We studied ventral visual cortex, an area of the brain that responds selectively to visual categories (faces, places, and words) in young adults, and that shows little atrophy with age. Functional MRI was used to estimate neural activity in this cortical area, while young and old adults viewed faces, houses, pseudowords, and chairs. The results demonstrated significantly less neural specialization for these stimulus categories in older adults across a range of analyses.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

A lifespan database of adult facial stimuli.

Faces constitute a unique and widely used category of stimuli. In spite of their importance, there are few collections of faces for use in research, none of which adequately represent the different ages of faces across the lifespan. This lack of a range of ages has limited the majority of researchers to using predominantly young faces as stimuli even when their hypotheses concern both young and old participants. We describe a database of 575 individual faces ranging from ages 18 to 93. Our database was developed to be more representative of age groups across the lifespan, with a special emphasis on recruiting older adults. The resulting database has faces of 218 adults age 18-29, 76 adults age 30-49, 123 adults age 50-69, and 158 adults age 70 and older. These faces may be acquired for research purposes from http://agingmind.cns.uiuc.edu/facedb/. This will allow researchers interested in using facial stimuli access to a wider age range of adult faces than has previously been available.

Adolescent↗