The findings provide support that Chinese calligraphy writing training for eight weeks using a cognitive approach would improve working memory and to a lesser extent attentional control functions of patients with early MCI. They also demonstrate the usefulness of using mind-and-body practice for improving specific cognitive functions.

No abstract

This study investigated how aging modulates semantic encoding. We used a task where participants were required to determine the semantic relatedness between the cue and target stimuli. Single‐character Chinese words were the cues, whereas two‐character words describing the cues were the targets. The targets can be visual‐based (appearance) or associative‐based (meaning). Experiment One compared the reaction times on the two types of targets between older (n = 29) and younger participants (n = 31). Older participants performed significantly slower on the visual‐ than associative‐based trials, while the younger participants showed no difference. The results suggest that aging would hinder semantic encoding of visual‐ rather than associative‐based processes. The slowness in processing is likely attributable to age‐related decline in attentional control. Experiment Two tested the aging effect on top‐down attentional control by presenting pre‐cue before each trial on older (n = 26) and younger participants (n = 49). The results indicated that valid pre‐cue reduced the latency differences between the visual‐ and associative‐based trials among the older participants. The valid pre‐cues were found to effectively shorten the reaction time of the visual‐based trials suggesting possible facilitation of attentional control among the older adults. Our findings substantiate age‐related attentional control decline only in visual‐ but not associative‐based processing. Future studies should explore the mechanisms underlying such differential age‐related effect.