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Age-related changes in working memory during sentence comprehension: an fMRI study
Murray Grossman1, Ayanna Cooke, Chris DeVita
1Department of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4283, USA.
Neuroimage
|January 19, 2002
Summary
Older adults maintain sentence comprehension by engaging additional brain regions for verbal working memory (WM). This compensatory neural activity helps seniors match younger adults' comprehension accuracy.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive Science
- Psycholinguistics
Background:
- Sentence comprehension abilities can decline with age, but the underlying neural mechanisms remain largely unknown.
- Understanding age-related changes in brain activity during language processing is crucial for cognitive health research.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the neural basis of age-related differences in sentence comprehension.
- To examine how verbal working memory (WM) demands and grammatical complexity affect brain activity in younger and older adults.
Main Methods:
- Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to monitor regional brain activity in young and senior adults.
- Participants completed a sentence comprehension task involving varying grammatical structures and verbal working memory loads.
Main Results:
- Both age groups utilized a core sentence processing network, including temporal and occipital cortex.
- Seniors showed altered activation in verbal WM networks, with less parietal and more premotor/inferior frontal cortex activity compared to younger adults.
- Younger adults recruited right posterolateral temporal cortex, while seniors additionally recruited right parietal cortex for demanding sentences.
Conclusions:
- Sentence comprehension relies on interacting neural networks for core processing and verbal working memory.
- Older adults with preserved comprehension may up-regulate neural substrates for verbal WM to compensate for age-related changes.