Chamberlain Jordan D, Bowman Caitlin R, Dennis Nancy A
Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA.
Department of Psychology, The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, USA.
Neurobiol Aging. 2022 May;113:15-27. doi: 10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2022.01.011. Epub 2022 Feb 5.
Typical aging is associated with increases in false memory rates among older adults. Such errors are frequently associated with differential neural activity during encoding and retrieval in older compared to younger adults within visual cortices and the hippocampus. It remains unknown how pattern similarity reductions relate to false memories in healthy aging. Using encoding-retrieval similarity (ERS) analyses in a sample of younger and older adults, we examined how the similarity of neural patterns between memory phases associated with target and lure objects was impacted by age and contributed to false memory rates. Single-item ERS for targets and lures was reduced by age throughout much of the ventral visual stream and the posterior hippocampus. Furthermore, ERS associated with perceptual lures within the visual stream maintained differential relationships with false memory. Finally, a global ERS metric accounted for age deficits in single-item ERS, but did not contribute to false memory rates. These findings highlight the contribution of age-related reductions in ERS across multiple representational levels to false memories in healthy aging.
典型的衰老与老年人错误记忆率的增加有关。与年轻人相比，老年人在视觉皮层和海马体中编码和检索过程中出现此类错误时，神经活动往往存在差异。在健康衰老过程中，模式相似性降低与错误记忆之间的关系尚不清楚。我们在年轻和老年成年人样本中使用编码-检索相似性（ERS）分析，研究了与目标和诱饵物体相关的记忆阶段之间神经模式的相似性如何受到年龄影响，并对错误记忆率产生影响。在腹侧视觉流和海马体后部的大部分区域，目标和诱饵的单项ERS随着年龄增长而降低。此外，视觉流中与感知诱饵相关的ERS与错误记忆保持着不同的关系。最后，一个全局ERS指标解释了单项ERS中的年龄缺陷，但对错误记忆率没有影响。这些发现突出了在健康衰老过程中，跨多个表征水平的与年龄相关的ERS降低对错误记忆的影响。
