Canadian researcher delivered course at School of Humanities
Photo: Camila Cunha
Last week, PUCRS opened its doors to psychologist Maximiliano Wilson, professor at the School of Medicine of Université Laval, in Quebec, Canada. Wilson is also a researcher of the CERVO Brain Research Center, at the same institution. His research is mostly concerned with the relationships between the reading ability and people’s knowledge of the concepts and world objects around them, during aging. Known as semantic memory, this knowledge refers to meanings, understandings and all concept-based forms. Wilson taught a course to School of Humanities’ Letters and Psychology students, titled How to develop a task in Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Psychology? From experimental design to statistical analysis. Please, check out the interview Maximiliano Wilson gave as he explained that aging is not always synonymous with cognitive loss.
Can aging affect reading and language in a negative way?
People believe that cognition declines systematically with aging. However, several experimental studies have shown that memory and semantic reading are two cognitive abilities that get better with time. What is interesting is that the improvement of these cognitive abilities also imply changes in the brain network underlying reading and semantics. In other words, our brain is plastic and is constantly reorganized with people’s experiences in their environments and this also holds true during aging for certain cognitive abilities, such as reading and semantics. Then, during what is known as “normal” aging – as opposed to pathological aging – reading and semantics improve.
What happens in pathological aging?
These very cognitive abilities can decline. For instance, Alzheimer’s patients may have trouble reading certain types of irregular words, that is, that deviate from the norms of a language. In Portuguese, táxi is an irregular word because the way the letter “x” is pronounced deviates from the norm, such as in abacaxi. Hence, an Alzheimer’s patient who has reading problems would read the letter x in táxi as one would read x in abacaxi. These reading problems are called surface dyslexia. People suffering from primary progressive aphasia tend to have surface dyslexia too. They have a progressive alteration of their semantic memory. Our neuroimaging studies have shown that the areas of the brain that undergo atrophy at the onset of the disease are those that are involved in reading and semantics. This shows that there is a fine line between reading and knowledge of the world or semantics.
How important is reading for the healthy elderly?
There are two ways to read words. One of them is to transform letters into sounds and then get access to the meaning (or semantics) of these words to understand what is being read. Another way to read is to process the entire word and activate its semantics and pronunciation. The latter is much more efficient than the first one because its success relates to our experiences. The more a person reads, the more they know the words, their meanings and pronunciation, the better the reader they will become. Our studies have shown that older people read better than younger ones and employ a strategy of entire words to read all the words, whereas young adults will only employ it to read the most frequent words or those that have an irregular pronunciation (such as táxi). This shift, which are characteristic of older readers being more efficient than younger ones, has its roots in the brain: the brain structures that are activated during semantic recognition are activated in the elderly for all types of words.
“The more a person reads, the more they know the words, their meanings and pronunciation, the better the reader they will be. Our studies have shown that older people read better than younger ones and employ a strategy of entire words to read all words.”
Photo: Camila Cunha
Can reading be used to prevent language and memory problems?
Studies on normal and pathological aging have shown that reading habits increase the brain capacity known as cognitive reserve. The larger the cognitive reserve, the longer it will take for people to present the cognitive difficulties of aging. Hence, the more a person reads, the more they can exercise this ability, and thus becomes a better reader. This, on top of pleasure reading, could work as a form of cognitive stimulus that keeps the brain active and stimulates the elderly, thus increasing their cognitive reserve to face aging-related changes.
Could reading be considered a therapeutic resource for Alzheimer’s patients in the elderly population? Is it good for the memory?
Reading and semantics, one of the types of memory, are closely connected and both improve during normal aging. Diseases such as Alzheimer’s and primary progressive aphasia have an impact on reading and semantics. Rehabilitation resources, employed by speech and language pathologists, that make it possible to improve these abilities, although they are limited and temporary. Current research has been looking at the combined effect of speech and language therapy with brain stimulation techniques, such as Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) or Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Although it is still early to ascertain, the combined administration of speech and language therapy and brain stimulation is a promising in the sense that it can postpone (or even improve) the progression of the difficulties of pathological aging patients.
