Aging-related episodic memory decline: are emotions the key? (original) (raw)
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Age and sex related changes in episodic memory function in middle aged and older adults
Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 2014
Age-related change in episodic memory function is commonly reported in older adults. When detected on neuropsychological tests, it may still be difficult to distinguish normal from pathological changes. The present study investigates age-and sex-related changes in a group of healthy middle-aged and older adults, participating in a three-wave study on cognitive aging. The California Verbal Learning test (CVLT-II) was used to assess their episodic memory function. A cross-sectional analysis of results from the first wave showed higher performance in females than males, with a steeper age-related decline in males. This was confirmed in a longitudinal analysis using a mixed effects regression model, but with a lower age-related change and smaller difference between the sexes. Information about learning strategies and errors in the third wave turned out to contribute significantly to explain change in episodic memory function across the three waves. We argue that the results from the longitudinal analyses are generalizable to the population of healthy middle-aged and older individuals, and that they could be useful in guiding clinicians when evaluating individuals with respect to cognitive change.
Evidence for preserved emotional memory in normal older persons
Emotion, 2003
Emotion has been shown to have a modulatory effect on declarative memory. Normal aging is associated with a decline in declarative memory, but whether aging might affect the influence of emotion on memory has not been established. To investigate this, we administered a task that provides a detailed assessment of emotional memory to 80 neurologically normal adults ranging in age from 35 to 85 years. Across ages, memory performance was found to be modulated by the emotional significance of stimuli in a comparable manner (improved memory for gist, compromised memory for visual detail), despite an overall decline in memory performance with increasing age. The results raise the interesting possibility that aging has a differential effect on hippocampal versus amygdala function.
International Journal of Psychophysiology, 2009
The ability to learn and remember new information declines along life. Empirical evidence reveals that this deficit occurs unevenly with different types of memory. Episodic memory, which is referred to as the ability to remember our own experiences in a determined temporal and spatial context, is especially vulnerable to aging. Episodic information can be retrieved with or without the context information that took place when the episodic event was encoded. There is agreement that, with advancing age, the source information related to an episodic event is more susceptible to be forgotten than the event; however, there is no consensus regarding the age at which this decline begins, the speed of source-memory decline along life or the possible changes, due to aging, in neurophysiological activity during encoding of source information that is subsequently correctly retrieved. In an attempt to answer the first two issues, a behavioral study with 552 subjects from 20 to 80 years of age was conducted, which provided evidence of the exact age at which source memory starts to decline and of the speed of this memory loss along life. To address the last question, event-related potentials were recorded while young and old adults encoded source information, to investigate whether older adults generate memory traces different from young adults during encoding.
Episodic memory function in advanced aging and early Alzheimer's disease
Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 1995
Despite some well-documented differences, normal aging and Alzheimer's disease (AD) share a number of common neuropathological and neuropsychological features. Many of the reported differences are largely quantitative in nature and there is often overlap between the respective distributions of these populations. To assess the issue of overlap and distinguishing features in memory functions between these groups, and to minimize aging effects per se, samples of older individuals in good health (ages 75–95 yr) and younger patients in the early stages of AD (age < 75 yr) were selected to be similar in global cognitive functioning. Despite comparable language and visuospatial scores, these preliminary results suggest important qualitative differences in episodic memory functions between these conditions, even when “low-functioning” or “at-risk” controls are compared with early AD patients. These findings furthermore highlight some of the challenges in defining “normality” among th...
Is episodic memory performance more vulnerable to depressive affect in older adulthood?
Neuropsychology, development, and cognition. Section B, Aging, neuropsychology and cognition, 2018
This study examined how age, depressive symptoms, demographic variables, frailty, and health factors jointly influence episodic memory across the lifespan in two large, diverse samples. Hierarchical regression analyses from both samples showed that depressive symptoms negatively impacted episodic memory performance with the effect being more pronounced for older adults. Health and frailty tended not to be associated with episodic memory. However, the main effect of depressive symptoms tended to remain significant over and above other predictors, while the interaction with age was weakened with the addition of demographic variables. The unique contribution of this study is demonstrating that the relationship between depressive symptoms and episodic memory is moderated by age across relatively large non-clinical lifespan samples of adults. The findings indicate the importance of measuring and studying depressive symptoms during the course of aging in order to better understand the com...
Anxiety, Cognitive Performance, and Cognitive Decline in Normal Aging
The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 2002
A sample of 704 cognitively intact individuals ( M age ϭ 63.7 years) performed a battery of cognitive tests on as many as three occasions, at approximately 3-year intervals. The authors used random effects models to analyze cross-sectional relationships between cognitive performance and state anxiety and longitudinal relationships between cognitive change and neuroticism, after controlling for gender, age, and education. Cross-sectionally, higher state anxiety was associated with poorer performance on Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale Synonyms,
Episodic memory performance in a multi-ethnic longitudinal study of 13,037 elderly
PloS one, 2018
Age-related changes in memory are not uniform, even in the absence of dementia. Characterization of non-disease associated cognitive changes is crucial to gain a more complete understanding of brain aging. Episodic memory was investigated in 13,037 ethnically diverse elderly (ages 72 to 85 years) with two to 15 years of follow-up, and with known dementia status, age, sex, education, and APOE genotypes. Adjusted trajectories of episodic memory performance over time were estimated using Latent Class Mixed Models. Analysis was conducted using two samples at baseline evaluation: i) non-cognitively impaired individuals, and ii) all individuals regardless of dementia status. We calculated the age-specific annual incidence rates of dementia in the non-demented elderly (n = 10,220). Two major episodic memory trajectories were estimated: 1) Stable-consisting of individuals exhibiting a constant or improved memory function, and 2) Decliner-consisting of individuals whose memory function decli...
Memory changes in healthy young and older adults
The Oxford handbook of …, 2000
The present chapter provides a review of the literature addressing changes in memory performance in older adults (often retired individuals with an age between 60 and 80 years), compared to younger adults (often college students around age 20). While it is well-established that memory performance declines in older adults (e.g., Kausler, 1994;, it is now clear that not all aspects of memory are impaired (e.
2011
We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the neural correlates of autobiographical, semantic, and episodic memory retrieval in healthy young and older adults. Participants were tested with an event-related paradigm in which retrieval demand was the only factor varying between trials. A Spatiotemporal Partial Least Square (ST-PLS) analysis was conducted to identify the main patterns of activity characterizing the groups across conditions. We identified brain regions activated by all three memory conditions relative to a control condition. This pattern was expressed equally in both age groups and replicated previous findings obtained in a separate group of younger adults. We also identified regions whose activity differentiated among the different memory conditions. These patterns of differentiation were expressed less strongly in the older adults than in the young adults, a finding which was further confirmed by barycentric discriminant analysis. This analysis showed an age-related dedifferentiation in autobiographical and episodic memory tasks, but not in the semantic memory task or the control condition. These findings suggest that the activation of a common memory retrieval network is maintained with age, whereas the specific aspects of brain activity that differ with memory content are more vulnerable and less selectively engaged in older adults. Our results provide a potential neural mechanism for the well-known age differences in episodic/autobiographical memory, and preserved semantic memory, observed when older adults are compared to younger adults.
Age-related differences in episodic feeling-of-knowing arise from differences in memory performance
Memory, 2014
Previous studies about the effects of ageing on the episodic feeling-of-knowing (FOK) accuracy and its underlying processes have yielded conflicting results. Recent work suggests that using alternative measures to gamma correlations might allow more accurate and informative interpretations of metamemory performance in ageing. We therefore investigated this issue with a large sample of 59 young and 61 older participants using alternative signal-detection theory (SDT) measures. These measures (receiver operating characteristic curves and Brier score) are recommended in the literature and able to reveal the characteristic profile of impairment in ageing. Our results suggest that the FOK accuracy deficit observed in the literature arises from differences in memory performance. This observation provides a convenient explanation to the previous discrepancies and furthermore supports the interest of the use of SDT-derived measures in the frame of metamemory.