Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA.
UC Davis Center for Neuroscience, University of California, Davis, CA, USA.
Nat Commun. 2020 Aug 7;11(1):3980. doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-17713-4.
Recent research has highlighted a role for the hippocampus and a Posterior Medial cortical network in signaling event boundaries. However, little is known about whether or how these neural processes change over the course of healthy aging. Here, 546 cognitively normal participants 18-88 years old viewed a short movie while brain activity was measured using fMRI. The hippocampus and regions of the Posterior Medial network show increased activity at event boundaries, but these boundary-evoked responses decrease with age. Boundary-evoked activity in the posterior hippocampus predicts performance on a separate test of memory for stories, suggesting that hippocampal activity during event segmentation may be a broad indicator of individual differences in episodic memory ability. In contrast, boundary-evoked responses in the medial prefrontal cortex and middle temporal gyrus increase across the age range. These findings suggest that aging may alter neural processes for segmenting and remembering continuous real-world experiences.
最近的研究强调了海马体和后内侧皮质网络在信号事件边界方面的作用。然而，对于这些神经过程在健康衰老过程中是否以及如何变化，我们知之甚少。在这里，546 名认知正常的参与者年龄在 18-88 岁之间，观看了一部短片，同时使用 fMRI 测量大脑活动。海马体和后内侧网络的区域在事件边界处表现出活动增加，但这些边界诱发的反应随着年龄的增长而减少。后海马体的边界诱发活动可以预测单独的故事记忆测试的表现，这表明事件分割过程中海马体的活动可能是个体在情节记忆能力上差异的一个广泛指标。相比之下，内侧前额叶皮层和中颞叶的边界诱发反应在整个年龄范围内增加。这些发现表明，衰老可能会改变分割和记忆连续真实世界体验的神经过程。
