TY  - INPR
A1  - Sommer, Verena R.
A1  - Fandakova, Yana
A1  - Grandy, Thomas H.
A1  - Shing, Yee Lee
A1  - Werkle-Bergner, Markus
A1  - Sander, Myriam Christine
T1  - Neural pattern similarity differentially affects memory performance of younger and older adults: age differences in neural similarity and memory
T2  - bioRxiv
N2  - Age-related memory decline is associated with changes in neural functioning but little is known about how aging affects the quality of information representation in the brain. Whereas a long-standing hypothesis of the aging literature links cognitive impairments to less distinct neural representations in old age, memory studies have shown that high similarity between activity patterns benefits memory performance for the respective stimuli. Here, we addressed this apparent conflict by investigating between-item representational similarity in 50 younger (19–27 years old) and 63 older (63–75 years old) human adults (male and female) who studied scene-word associations using a mnemonic imagery strategy while electroencephalography was recorded. We compared the similarity of spatiotemporal frequency patterns elicited during encoding of items with different subsequent memory fate. Compared to younger adults, older adults’ memory representations were more similar to each other but items that elicited the most similar activity patterns early in the encoding trial were those that were best remembered by older adults. In contrast, young adults’ memory performance benefited from decreased similarity between earlier and later periods in the encoding trials, which might reflect their better success in forming unique memorable mental images of the joint picture–word pair. Our results advance the understanding of the representational properties that give rise to memory quality as well as how these properties change in the course of aging.
Y1  - 2019
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/72524
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-725242
IS  - 528620
ER  -