title: Maintenance of youth-like processing protects against false memory in later adulthood.
abstract: Normal cognitive aging compromises the ability to form and retrieve associations among features of a memory episode. One indicator of this age-related deficit is older adults' difficulty in detecting and correctly rejecting new associations of familiar items. Comparing 28 younger and 30 older adults on a continuous recognition task with word pairs, we found that older adults whose activation patterns deviate less from the average pattern of younger adults while detecting repaired associations show the following: (1) higher overall memory and fewer false recognitions; (2) stronger functional connectivity of prefrontal regions with middle temporal and parahippocampal gyrus; and (3) higher recall and strategic categorical clustering in an independently assessed free recall task. Deviations from the average young-adult network reflected underactivation of frontoparietal regions instead of overactivation of regions not activated by younger adults. We conclude that maintenance of youth-like task-relevant activation patterns is critical for preserving memory functions in later adulthood.
authors.affiliation: Center for Lifespan Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Yana
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Fandakova
authors.affiliation: Center for Lifespan Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Ulman
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Lindenberger
authors.affiliation: Center for Lifespan Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany. Electronic address: yshing@mpib-berlin.mpg.de.
authors.forename: Yee Lee
authors.initials: YL
authors.lastname: Shing
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D008569:Memory Disorders / Q000517:prevention & control* / Q000523:psychology; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Aging; Cognitive control; Episodic memory; False memory; fMRI