TY  - JOUR
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 relates to memory performance in younger and older adults
T2  - Journal of Neuroscience
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 (“neural dedifferentiation”), memory studies have shown that overlapping neural representations of different studied items are beneficial for memory performance. In an electroencephalography (EEG) study, we addressed the question whether distinctiveness or similarity between patterns of neural activity supports memory differentially in younger and older adults. We analyzed between-item neural pattern similarity in 50 younger (19–27 years old) and 63 older (63–75 years old) male and female human adults who repeatedly studied and recalled scene–word associations using a mnemonic imagery strategy. We compared the similarity of spatiotemporal EEG frequency patterns during initial encoding in relation to subsequent recall performance. The within-person association between memory success and pattern similarity differed between age groups: For older adults, better memory performance was linked to higher similarity early in the encoding trials, whereas young adults benefited from lower similarity between earlier and later periods during encoding, which might reflect their better success in forming unique memorable mental images of the joint picture–word pairs. Our results advance the understanding of the representational properties that give rise to subsequent memory, as well as how these properties may change in the course of aging.
KW  - aging
KW  - EEG
KW  - episodic memory
KW  - representational similarity
Y1  - 2019
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/74776
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-747760
SN  - 0270-6474
VL  - 39.2019
IS  - 41
SP  - 8089
EP  - 8099
PB  - Society for Neuroscience, SfN
CY  - Washington, DC
ER  -