Examining the expectation deficit in normal aging.

Editor's Note: These short, critical reviews of recent papers in the Journal, written exclusively by graduate students or postdoctoral fellows, are intended to summarize the important findings of the paper and provide additional insight and commentary. For more information on the format and purpose of the Journal Club, please see Review of Zanto et al. A frequently examined ability that deteriorates with age is attentional orienting (Hämmerer et al., 2010; Bollinger et al., 2011). Orienting one's attention toward relevant information helps to optimize performance, but older adults typically show an impaired use of predictive cues to guide attention (Hämmerer et al., 2010; Bollinger et al., 2011). Consistent with theories that attribute age-related decline to decreased frontal lobe connectivity (Fa-biani and Gratton, 2012), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) indicates that older adults' attentional orienting deficit is underpinned by diminished functional connectivity between the pre-frontal cortex and the visual association cortex (Bollinger et al., 2011). Research in young adults has suggested that the ability to anticipate the timing of upcoming events is also imperative for optimal behavior (Stefanics et al., 2010). However, before a recent publication by Zanto et al. (2011) in The Journal of Neu-roscience, older adults' facility with temporal orienting had not been explored. Because of its high temporal resolution relative to fMRI, electroencephalography (EEG) is a crucial tool for studying temporal orienting. Responding to the absence of age-related temporal orienting research, Zanto et al. (2011) used EEG to compare temporal orienting across older and younger adults. Zanto et al. (2011) tested younger (mean age 24.6 years) and older (mean age 69.7 years) adults on a temporally cued target-response task while recording participants' ongoing EEG. Predictive (P) cue letters signaled the length of the cue-target foreperiod, which was either short (S, 600 ms) or long (L, 1400 ms). Neutral (N) cues were equally followed by long or short foreperiods, thus creating four possible trial types: PS, PL, NS, NL. Younger and older adults' performance was compared using four-way ANOVAs with task complexity, forep-eriod (short, long), cue (predictive, neutral) and age (older, younger) as factors. This analysis was applied to participants' reaction time (RT) data, the visual event-related potentials (ERPs) evoked by the cue itself (P1 and N1), the contingent negative variation (CNV), and alpha power during the final 200 ms of the foreperiod, and finally the ERPs evoked by the target stimulus (P1, N1, and P3). The major finding was …