title: Age and the neural network of personal familiarity.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Accessing information that defines personally familiar context in real-world situations is essential for the social interactions and the independent functioning of an individual. Personal familiarity is associated with the availability of semantic and episodic information as well as the emotional meaningfulness surrounding a stimulus. These features are known to be associated with neural activity in distinct brain regions across different stimulus conditions (e.g., when perceiving faces, voices, places, objects), which may reflect a shared neural basis. Although perceiving context-rich personal familiarity may appear unchanged in aging on the behavioral level, it has not yet been studied whether this can be supported by neuroimaging data.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the neural network associated with personal familiarity during the perception of personally familiar faces and places. Twelve young and twelve elderly cognitively healthy subjects participated in the study. Both age groups showed a similar activation pattern underlying personal familiarity, predominantly in anterior cingulate and posterior cingulate cortices, irrespective of the stimulus type. The young subjects, but not the elderly subjects demonstrated an additional anterior cingulate deactivation when perceiving unfamiliar stimuli.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Although we found evidence for an age-dependent reduction in frontal cortical deactivation, our data show that there is a stimulus-independent neural network associated with personal familiarity of faces and places, which is less susceptible to aging-related changes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Clinic Carl Gustav Carus, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany. markus.donix@uniklinikum-dresden.de
authors.forename: Markus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Donix
authors.forename: Katja
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Petrowski
authors.forename: Luisa
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Jurjanz
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Huebner
authors.forename: Ulf
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Herold
authors.forename: Damaris
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Baeumler
authors.forename: Eva C
authors.initials: EC
authors.lastname: Amanatidis
authors.forename: Katrin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Poettrich
authors.forename: Michael N
authors.initials: MN
authors.lastname: Smolka
authors.forename: Vjera A
authors.initials: VA
authors.lastname: Holthoff
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping / Q000379:methods*; D003952:Diagnostic Imaging / Q000379:methods; D005145:Face; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009415:Nerve Net; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*