Maintenance of youth-like processing protects against false memory in later adulthood

Citation

Fandakova Y, Lindenberger U & Shing YL (2015) Maintenance of youth-like processing protects against false memory in later adulthood. Neurobiology of Aging, 36 (2), pp. 933-941. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2014.10.022

Abstract
Normal cognitive aging compromises the ability to form and retrieve associations among features of a memory episode. One indicator of this age-related deficit is older adults' difficulty in detecting and correctly rejecting new associations of familiar items. Comparing 28 younger and 30 older adults on a continuous recognition task with word pairs, we found that older adults whose activation patterns deviate less from the average pattern of younger adults while detecting repaired associations show the following: (1) higher overall memory and fewer false recognitions; (2) stronger functional connectivity of prefrontal regions with middle temporal and parahippocampal gyrus; and (3) higher recall and strategic categorical clustering in an independently assessed free recall task. Deviations from the average young-adult network reflected underactivation of frontoparietal regions instead of overactivation of regions not activated by younger adults. We conclude that maintenance of youth-like task-relevant activation patterns is critical for preserving memory functions in later adulthood.

Keywords
Episodic memory; Aging; False memory; Cognitive control; fMRI

Journal
Neurobiology of Aging: Volume 36, Issue 2