Czernochowski Daniela, Fabiani Monica, Friedman David
Cognitive Electrophysiology Laboratory, New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, NY 10032, United States.
Neurobiol Aging. 2008 Jun;29(6):945-58. doi: 10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2006.12.017. Epub 2007 Feb 5.
An important goal of aging research is to determine factors leading to individual differences that might compensate for some of the deleterious effects of aging on cognition. To determine whether socio-economic status (SES) plays a role in mitigating age-related decrements in the recollection of contextual details, we categorized older participants into low- and high-SES groups. Event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral data were recorded in a picture memory task involving recency and recognition judgments. Young, old-low and old-high SES groups did not differ in recognition performance. However, on recency judgments, old-low subjects performed at chance, whereas old-high subjects did not differ significantly from young adults. Consistent with their preserved recency performance, a long-duration frontal negativity was significantly larger for recency compared to recognition trials in the ERPs of the old-high SES group only. These data suggest that older adults with higher SES levels can use strategies to compensate for the adverse effects of aging in complex source memory tasks by recruiting additional neural resources apparently not required by the young.
衰老研究的一个重要目标是确定导致个体差异的因素，这些差异可能会补偿衰老对认知的一些有害影响。为了确定社会经济地位（SES）是否在减轻与年龄相关的情境细节记忆衰退方面发挥作用，我们将老年参与者分为低SES组和高SES组。在一项涉及近期记忆和识别判断的图片记忆任务中记录了事件相关电位（ERP）和行为数据。年轻组、低SES老年组和高SES老年组在识别表现上没有差异。然而，在近期记忆判断方面，低SES老年受试者表现随机，而高SES老年受试者与年轻成年人没有显著差异。与他们保留的近期记忆表现一致，仅在高SES老年组的ERP中，与识别试验相比，近期记忆试验中持续时间较长的额叶负波显著更大。这些数据表明，社会经济地位较高的老年人可以通过调用年轻人显然不需要的额外神经资源，利用策略来补偿复杂源记忆任务中衰老的不利影响。
