Jon Prince

With dementia incidence projected to escalate significantly within the next 25 years, the United Nations declared 2021-2030 the Decade of Healthy Ageing, emphasising cognition as a crucial element. As a leading discipline in cognition and ageing research, psychology is well-equipped to offer insights for translational research, clinical practice, and policy-making. In this comprehensive review, we discuss the current state of knowledge on age-related changes in cognition and psychological health. We discuss cognitive changes during ageing, including (a) heterogeneity in the rate, trajectory, and characteristics of decline experienced by older adults, (b) the role of cognitive reserve in age-related cognitive decline, and (c) the potential for cognitive training to slow this decline. We also examine ageing and cognition through multiple theoretical perspectives. We highlight critical unresolved issues, such as the disparate implications of subjective versus objective measures of cognitive decline and the insufficient evaluation of cognitive training programs. We suggest future research directions, and emphasise interdisciplinary collaboration to create a more comprehensive understanding of the factors that modulate cognitive ageing.

Goal-directed, intentional mental imagery generation supports a range of daily self-regulatory activities, such as planning, decision-making, and recreational escapism. Many clinical interventions for mood and anxiety disorders also use imagery and their effectiveness can be affected by an individual's ability to manipulate vividness and content of mental imagery. Prior literature points towards music as a promising candidate to influence imagination in such settings, but basic questions remain regarding how music affects mental imagery and how it interacts with basic, well-established parameters, such as facilitatory effects of eye closure. One hundred participants listened to music and a silent control whilst performing a guided mental imagery task. Specifically, participants saw a short video of a figure journeying towards a landmark and imagined a continuation of the journey with either closed or open eyes. After each trial, participants reported vividness and content of their imagined journeys. Bayesian Mixed Effects Models obtained strong evidence of greater vividness, duration, as well as distance travelled in music conditions compared to silent conditions. Additionally, interactive effects of music and eye closure were found for both vividness and the emotional valence of imagined content, where music effects were disproportionately amplified by eye closure. Findings further support music's potential to manipulate the perceptual, spatial-temporal, as well as emotional sentiment of deliberately generated mental imagery.

Although theories of emotion associate negative emotional symptoms with cognitive biases in information processing, they rarely specify the details. Here, we characterize cognitive biases in information processing of pleasant and unpleasant information, and how these biases covary with anxious and depressive symptoms, while controlling for general stress and cognitive ability. Forty undergraduates provided emotional symptom scores (Depression Anxiety Stress Scale–21) and performed a statistical learning task that required predicting the next sound in a long sequence of either pleasant or unpleasant naturalistic sounds (blocks). We used an information weights framework to determine if the degree of behavioral change associated with observing either confirmatory (“B” follows “A”) or disconfirmatory (“B” does not follow “A”) transitions differs for pleasant and unpleasant sounds. Bayesian mixed-effects models revealed that negative emotional symptom scores predicted performance as well as processing biases of pleasant and unpleasant information. Further, information weights differed between pleasant and unpleasant information, and importantly, this difference varied based on symptom scores. For example, higher depressive symptom scores predicted a bias of underutilizing disconfirmatory information in unpleasant content. These findings have implications for models of emotional disorders by offering a mechanistic explanation and formalization of the associated cognitive biases.

This study involved applying mindful awareness to external attentional targets by substituting the breath with nature sounds or music in mindfulness practice. We hypothesized that this would influence mindfulness attentional skills acquisition, psychological functioning, physiological well-being, and session attendance. Seventy-nine healthy adults either mindfully focused on the breath (Control), nature sounds (Nature Sounds), or music tracks (Music) throughout an 8-week structured group mindfulness program. Participants completed the Outcome Rating Scale and session rating questionnaire every session, and the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, Brief Resilience Scale, and Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-42 at the start and end of the program. Heart rate variability was assessed using the Alive Programme at the start and end of the program too. We analyzed both quantitative and qualitative outcomes in this study. Both Nature Sounds and Music conditions had enhanced session attendance rates compared with the Control condition. Each condition showed unique patterns of mindfulness attentional skills acquisition. Furthermore, only Nature Sounds and Music conditions showed within-condition reductions in symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress. Participants in Nature Sounds and Music conditions also reported increased likelihood to generalise skills acquired in the sessions into daily life, noted imagery, and acknowledged the impermanence of their experiences. Future research should involve applying the current study’s protocol to suitable subclinical populations to further elucidate the process involved in mindfully attuning to nature sounds and music and to augment mindfulness attentional skills, psychological functioning, physiological well-being, and session attendance.

Cognitive biases in information processing of valenced stimuli are a major contributor to the phenomenology of mood disorders. However, current screening tools for mood disorders rely on self-report questionnaires, which include uncomfortably invasive questions and are confounded by socially desirable responding. Taken together, assessing information processing biases may be a promising proxy to screen non-invasively for mood disorders. Here, we report data of 60 participants that performed a continuous statistical learning task in which respondents were asked to predict the next event in a sequence of musical chords. An underlying transitional probability matrix governed the chord sequences. Each participant performed both a positive- and negative-valence block of this task, where blocks differed in the precise musical chords used. A pilot experiment established that the sequences from both blocks evoked their intended perceived valence. Furthermore, cognitive assessment (Raven’s advanced matrices) as well as mood scores (DASS-21) were collected. Bayesian mixed effects models revealed that participants were able to extract the underlying transitional probabilities and that higher cognitive ability predicted higher performance. Furthermore, there was strong evidence that the depression, anxiety, and stress subscales all predicted learning trajectories, and interacted with stimulus valence. Thus, the present results show that information processing differences in a musical context are consistent with the phenomenology of mood disorders. The present study is one step towards a non-invasive musical tool to screen for mood disorders.

Presenting a stimulus at the most expected point in time should benefit its perceptual processing (Jones, 1976; Large & Jones, 1999). For example, accuracy decreases when comparing the pitch of two tones separated by a sequence of temporally regular distractors if the final tone is shifted away from the expected time (Jones, Moynihan, MacKenzie, & Puente, 2002). However, recent research could not replicate this effect (Bauer, Jaeger, Thorne, Bendixen, & Debener, 2015), so we explored possible explanations. First, we varied the size and probability of timing shifts of the comparison tone in 7 experimental combinations (N = 16 in each). Second, we strengthened temporal expectancies by using a rhythmically rich distractor sequence, either repeating the standard tone at the end of the sequence (N = 26) or not (N = 28). Third, we had listeners compare either the timbre (N = 55) or the loudness (N = 24) instead of pitch. No effects of temporal expectancy (nor interactions with musical training) emerged in these experiments; however, they did occur when participants judged the relative duration of time intervals (N = 38). That is, a temporal expectancy profile was only observable in the context of a temporal task, and did not generalize to other domains.

In typical Western music, important pitches occur disproportionately often on important beats, referred to as the tonal-metric hierarchy (Prince & Schmuckler, 2014, Music Perception, 31, 254–270). We tested whether listeners are sensitive to this alignment of pitch and temporal structure. In Experiment 1, the stimuli were 200 artificial melodies with random pitch contours; all melodies had both a regular beat and a pitch class distribution that favored one musical key, but had either high or low agreement with the tonal-metric hierarchy. Thirty-two listeners rated the goodness of each melody, and another 41 listeners rated the melodies’ metric clarity (how clear the beat was). The tonal-metric hierarchy did not affect either rating type, likely because the melodies may have only weakly (at best) established a musical key. In Experiment 2, we shuffled the pitches in 60 composed melodies (scrambling pitch contour, but not rhythm) to generate versions with high and low agreement with the tonal-metric hierarchy. Both ratings of goodness (N = 40) and metric clarity (N = 40) revealed strong evidence of the tonal-metric hierarchy influencing ratings; there was no effect of musical training. In Experiment 3, we phase-shifted, rather than shuffled, the pitches from the composed melodies, thus preserving pitch contour. Both rating types (goodness N = 43, metric clarity N = 32) replicated the results of Experiment 2. These findings establish the psychological reality of the tonal-metric hierarchy.