Young adult | EPFL Graph Search

In medicine and the social sciences, a young adult is generally a person in the years following adolescence, regardless of the local legal definition of "adult". Definitions and opinions on what qualifies as a young adult vary, with works such as Erik Erikson's stages of human development significantly influencing the definition of the term; generally, the term is often used to refer to adults in approximately the age range of 18 to 40 years, with some more inclusive definitions extending the definition into the early to mid 40s. The young adult stage in human development precedes middle adulthood. In the literary business, the term young adult is very often used informally or in a marketing sense for the readers of young adult literature, books targeted at children down to ages 12 or 13. This broad extension of young adult to minors has been disputed, as they are not considered adults by the law or in most cultures, outside of religion (such as the Bar or Bat Mitzvah in Judaism), and the tradition of biological adulthood beginning at puberty has become archaic. For a variety of reasons, timelines on young adulthood cannot be exactly defined—producing different results according to the different mix of overlapping indices (legal, maturational, occupational, sexual, emotional and the like) employed, or on whether 'a developmental perspective... [or] the socialization perspective is taken. 'Sub-phases in this timetable of psycho-social growth patterns... are not rigid, and both social change and individual variations must be taken into account'—not to mention regional and cultural differences. Arguably indeed, with people living longer, and also reaching puberty earlier, 'age norms for major life events have become highly elastic' by the twenty-first century. Due to generational changes, the pathway for young adults to fulfill their adult responsibilities has become less predictable. With growing changes in college education costs, living arrangements, and work and education opportunities, young adults are experiencing various life transitions in many stages of adulthood rather than one stage itself.

The aging brain as a model to understand motor skill acquisition in humans and its restoration using non-invasive brain stimulation

Pablo Maceira Elvira

Motor skill acquisition is essential to our survival, as it enables an efficient interaction with the changing world around us. The acquisition of novel sequential tasks, of particular relevance due to their pervasiveness in everyday life activities, can become more challenging at an advanced age, with structural and functional changes in the brain often resulting in diminished learning abilities. During the pursuit of my doctoral degree, I studied some of the processes leading to the acquisition of a novel sequential motor task, and how some of the mechanisms underlying these processes differ between healthy young and older adults. Young adults acquired the sequential task effectively by prioritizing its accurate execution early in training and focusing on increasing their speed thereafter, resulting in the generation of mechanically efficient execution patterns in the replication of the sequence. In contrast, older adults improved both the accuracy and the speed simultaneously and gradually after more extensive practice, which resulted in an overall decreased performance of the task. However, anodal direct current stimulation applied over the motor cortex partially restored skill acquisition in older adults by facilitating the early improvement of the accuracy, enabling an accelerated generation of efficient execution patterns in the sequence, similar to those seen in young adults. Further investigations into the effects of stimulation to improve skill acquisition in healthy older adults showed age not to be a determinant factor for an individual's proneness to benefit from stimulation; rather, it is the state of the neural system of each individual what likely determines the potential benefits to be had from stimulation. Therefore, a better understanding of the mechanisms targeted by stimulation and the identification of parameters signaling an individual's likelihood to benefit from it are needed to use these techniques to their full potential. Leveraging this knowledge and taking advantage of the portability, robustness and accessibility of this technique could represent an attractive option for applications involving extensive motor training, such as rehabilitative training provided after stroke.

EPFL2022

Improving emotional face perception in autism with diuretic bumetanide: A proof-of-concept behavioral and functional brain imaging pilot study

Nouchine Hadjikhani, Loyse Hippolyte, Ophélie Rogier, Torsten Ruest

Clinical observations have shown that GABA-acting benzodiazepines exert paradoxical excitatory effects in autism, suggesting elevated intracellular chloride (Cl-)(i) and excitatory action of GABA. In a previous double-blind randomized study, we have shown that the diuretic NKCC1 chloride importer antagonist bumetanide, that decreases (Cl-)(i) and reinforces GABAergic inhibition, reduces the severity of autism symptoms. Here, we report results from an open-label trial pilot study in which we used functional magnetic resonance imaging and neuropsychological testing to determine the effects of 10 months bumetanide treatment in adolescents and young adults with autism. We show that bumetanide treatment improves emotion recognition and enhances the activation of brain regions involved in social and emotional perception during the perception of emotional faces. The improvement of emotion processing by bumetanide reinforces the usefulness of bumetanide as a promising treatment to improve social interactions in autism.

Sage Publications Ltd2015

The aging brain as a model to understand motor skill acquisition in humans and its restoration using non-invasive brain stimulation

Pablo Maceira Elvira

EPFL2022