Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Washington University in St Louis, USA; Department of Psychology, Stony Brook University, USA.
Department of Psychology, Francis Marion University, USA.
Neuropsychologia. 2022 Aug 13;173:108298. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108298. Epub 2022 Jun 10.
Spatial navigation and spatial memory are two important skills for independent living, and are known to be compromised with age. Here, we investigate the neural correlates of successful spatial memory in healthy older adults in order to learn more about the neural underpinnings of maintenance of navigation skill into old age. Healthy older adults watched a video shot by a person navigating a route and were asked to remember objects along the route and then attempted to remember object locations by virtually pointing to the location of hidden objects from several locations along the route. Brain activity during watching and pointing was recorded with functional MRI. Larger activations in temporal and frontal regions during watching, and larger deactivations in superior parietal cortex and intraparietal sulcus during pointing, were associated with smaller location errors. These findings suggest that larger evoked responses during learning of spatial information coupled with larger deactivation of canonical spatial memory regions at retrieval are important for effective spatial memory in late life.
空间导航和空间记忆是独立生活的两项重要技能，而且随着年龄的增长而受损。在这里，我们研究了健康老年人成功进行空间记忆的神经相关性，以便更多地了解导航技能在老年时得以维持的神经基础。健康的老年人观看了一个人导航路线的视频，并被要求记住沿途的物体，然后从路线的几个位置尝试通过虚拟指向隐藏物体的位置来记住物体的位置。在观看和指向过程中记录了功能磁共振成像的大脑活动。观看时颞叶和额叶区域的激活较大，指向时顶叶上回和顶内沟的去激活较大，与位置误差较小相关。这些发现表明，在学习空间信息时引起的反应较大，在检索时与典型的空间记忆区域的去激活较大，这对于晚年有效的空间记忆很重要。
