Eva Vandenbusche, CogTex lab, Brain & Cognition, KU Leuven: "Reactive-proactive control balance in healthy aging"

Monday 27 May 2024, 14:00 → 15:01 Europe/Brussels

B-30/0-000 - Big meeting room (CRC)

Abstract: We are continuously bombarded with input. Our cognitive system needs to selectively process relevant input, maintain this input and inhibit automatic or irrelevant input, to achieve our goals. This process is called cognitive control. The DMC theory distinguishes proactive and reactive control. Proactive control is an early selection mechanism that works preventively and anticipatory before conflict occurs. Reactive control is a late correction mechanism that detects and resolves conflict after it occurs. Young adults flexibly switch between reactive and proactive control. During aging, however, this cognitive control balance is disturbed and it has been proposed that a shift takes place from a mainly proactive to a mainly reactive control pattern. This shift can lead to important decrements in cognitive performance. We aimed to assess the reactive-proactive control balance in a sample of heathy young and older adults, using two cognitive control tasks (i.e., Flanker task with proportion congruency manipulation and AX-CPT) and concurrently measuring EEG. I will discuss preliminary data of this study. These data could expose whether a disturbed cognitive control balance is present in older versus young adults.

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