Tsuchida Junko, Kubo Namiko, Kojima Shozo
Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, Inuyama, Aichi, Japan.
Behav Brain Res. 2002 Feb 1;129(1-2):107-12. doi: 10.1016/s0166-4328(01)00336-9.
We examined aged and young monkeys using a multiple position reversal task to investigate declines in cognitive functions with aging. The task consisted of an original learning task (simple position discrimination task) and a reversal learning task. While the performance of the aged monkeys was not different from that of the young monkeys in the original learning task, the aged monkeys showed a poorer performance than the young monkeys in the reversal learning task. According to our response analysis, the poor performance of aged monkeys in the reversal learning was not caused mainly by repetition of error responses, but rather by the impairment of understanding of the association between stimulus and reward. These results suggest that the prefrontal cortex, particularly the medial orbital cortex, is impaired with aging.
我们使用多位置反转任务对老年和幼年猴子进行了检查，以研究认知功能随衰老的衰退情况。该任务包括一个原始学习任务（简单位置辨别任务）和一个反转学习任务。虽然老年猴子在原始学习任务中的表现与幼年猴子没有差异，但在反转学习任务中，老年猴子的表现比幼年猴子差。根据我们的反应分析，老年猴子在反转学习中表现不佳主要不是由错误反应的重复引起的，而是由对刺激与奖励之间关联的理解受损导致的。这些结果表明，前额叶皮质，尤其是内侧眶额皮质，会随着衰老而受损。
