Can You Teach an Old Dog New Tricks? How Older Adults Perceive Embodied Agents

Can old dogs learn new tricks?

Many of these old adages can’t be traced back to their origins, but the reference to senior dogs and their learning capacity has a documented origin. The source of these well-worn words is an English gentleman named Fitzherbert who wrote a treatise on animal husbandry in 1523. In the cumbersome vernacular of the times, he said that “the dogge must lerne when he is a whelpe, or els it wyl not be...

Psychology and Aging Can An Old Dog Learn (and Want To Experience) New Tricks? Cognitive Training Increases Openness to Experience in Older Adults

Can an old dog learn (and want to experience) new tricks? Cognitive training increases openness to experience in older adults.

The present study investigated whether an intervention aimed to increase cognitive ability in older adults also changes the personality trait of openness to experience. Older adults completed a 16-week program in inductive reasoning training supplemented by weekly crossword and Sudoku puzzles. Changes in openness to experience were modeled across four assessments over 30 weeks using latent grow...

C-reactive protein in community-acquired sepsis: you can teach new tricks to an old dog

Severe sepsis is a major challenge for clinicians caring for acutely ill patients. For many years, several biomarkers have been tested and proposed to improve the ability not only to diagnose but also to anticipate clinical response to antibiotics. Despite the availability of many sophisticated and novel biomarkers, current evidence demonstrates that C-reactive protein (CRP), a well-known and r...

You can teach an old dog new tricks: angiopoietin-1 instructs Tie2pos myeloid cells to promote neovascularization in ischemic limbs

It can be difficult to document effects of age-related olfactory loss on eating behavior. However, we have reported that elders, especially those with poor olfaction, were more willing to accept novel foods than were younger adults. It was also found that elderly subjects were more willing to accept foods with unpleasant odors than were young subjects. Because there is often confounding between...