Dear colleagues,

The Brain Imaging Centre at the Research Centre for Natural Sciences is pleased to invite you to the 
following talk by

Andrew R. Bender
Michigan State University 
https://neurology.msu.edu/directory/andrew-bender

Neural correlates of retest learning in aging and dementia
(see abstract below)

Date & time: *16.09.2019, Monday, 13:00-14:00*
Location: D4.09C, MTA-TTK, Magyar Tudósok krt. 2, 1117, Budapest

We are looking forward to seeing you there!

Abstract
Retest learning and practice effects – improvements in performance following multiple presentations of cognitive and behavioral tasks – are primarily of interest to cognitive aging researchers because they can obscure true longitudinal decline. Importantly, these improvements following prior exposure to test content and/or format are not consistently influenced by age, education, and other relevant demographic factors. In addition, evidence from neuroimaging research has revealed links between practice effects and brain structure, including hippocampal volume and white matter microstructure. Furthermore, research on age-related neurodegeneration demonstrates attenuated practice and retest learning effects among older adults with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease pathology. I will show that by treating retest learning as a signal of interest, rather than unwanted noise, retest learning is a valuable marker of neurocognitive status. My work has related retest learning over years and practice effects over minutes to common brain structures implicated in age-related declines in learning and memory. Using evidence from multiple aging studies, including my own findings from data collected at Wayne State, in BASE-II, and in ADNI, I will discuss how retest learning can serve as a marker of the integrity in neural mechanisms affected by age-related neurodegenerative disease and  new opportunities and methods for measuring practice and retest learning effects. 