TY - JOUR
T1 - Aging and the encoding of changes in events
T2 - The role of neural activity pattern reinstatement
AU - Stawarczyk, David
AU - Wahlheim, Christopher N.
AU - Etzel, Joset A.
AU - Snyder, Abraham Z.
AU - Zacks, Jeffrey M.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2020/11/24
Y1 - 2020/11/24
N2 - When encountering unexpected event changes, memories of relevant past experiences must be updated to form new representations. Current models of memory updating propose that people must first generate memory-based predictions to detect and register that features of the environment have changed, then encode the new event features and integrate them with relevant memories of past experiences to form configural memory representations. Each of these steps may be impaired in older adults. Using functional MRI, we investigated these mechanisms in healthy young and older adults. In the scanner, participants first watched a movie depicting everyday activities in a day of an actor's life. They next watched a second nearly identical movie in which some scenes ended differently. Crucially, before watching the last part of each activity, the second movie stopped, and participants were asked to mentally replay how the activity previously ended. Three days later, participants were asked to recall the activities. Neural activity pattern reinstatement in medial temporal lobe (MTL) during the replay phase of the second movie was associated with detecting changes and with better memory for the original activity features. Reinstatements in posterior medial cortex (PMC) additionally predicted better memory for changed features. Compared to young adults, older adults showed a reduced ability to detect and remember changes and weaker associations between reinstatement and memory performance. These findings suggest that PMC and MTL contribute to change processing by reinstating previous event features, and that older adults are less able to use reinstatement to update memory for changed features.
AB - When encountering unexpected event changes, memories of relevant past experiences must be updated to form new representations. Current models of memory updating propose that people must first generate memory-based predictions to detect and register that features of the environment have changed, then encode the new event features and integrate them with relevant memories of past experiences to form configural memory representations. Each of these steps may be impaired in older adults. Using functional MRI, we investigated these mechanisms in healthy young and older adults. In the scanner, participants first watched a movie depicting everyday activities in a day of an actor's life. They next watched a second nearly identical movie in which some scenes ended differently. Crucially, before watching the last part of each activity, the second movie stopped, and participants were asked to mentally replay how the activity previously ended. Three days later, participants were asked to recall the activities. Neural activity pattern reinstatement in medial temporal lobe (MTL) during the replay phase of the second movie was associated with detecting changes and with better memory for the original activity features. Reinstatements in posterior medial cortex (PMC) additionally predicted better memory for changed features. Compared to young adults, older adults showed a reduced ability to detect and remember changes and weaker associations between reinstatement and memory performance. These findings suggest that PMC and MTL contribute to change processing by reinstating previous event features, and that older adults are less able to use reinstatement to update memory for changed features.
KW - Change comprehension
KW - Cognitive aging
KW - Episodic memory
KW - Event cognition
KW - Representational similarity analysis
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85096887862&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1073/pnas.1918063117
DO - 10.1073/pnas.1918063117
M3 - Article
C2 - 33229530
AN - SCOPUS:85096887862
VL - 117
SP - 29346
EP - 29353
JO - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
SN - 0027-8424
IS - 47
ER -