心智老化是一個複雜的生命發展歷程。認知老化的行為研究，普遍將衰退視為高齡心智的表徵，而忽略了中高齡長者在身心表現上的個體差異。運用認知行為量測與心智腦造影技術，三位跨領域心理學研究學者，將分別簡介教育、語言與決策的認知神經科學發現，說明高齡大腦在生物老化機制與後天環境經驗交互作用下的動態適應認知歷程，並提供我們達成活躍老化（active aging）的高齡認知心智運作的神經生理基礎。

To successfully comprehend a message, information acquired through different sensory modalities must be rapidly combined and integrated with long-term knowledge. Although theories of language comprehension often assume that language comprehension arises along a single processing stream, leading to a single meaning representation for an utterance or text, there is an emerging understanding that comprehension arises along multiple, parallel processing streams in which the two cerebral hemispheres play complementary roles. Normal aging is accompanied by changes in both structural and functional cerebral organization. Although verbal knowledge seems to be relatively stable across the lifespan, there are age-related changes in the rapid use of that knowledge during on-line language processing. In this talk I will address how aging affects effectiveness of preparing upcoming words and building an integrated sentence-level representation. I will also share several research works discussing the impacts of linguistic properties on sensory and number processing.