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Highlighting and Reducing the Impact of Negative Aging Stereotypes During Older Adults' Cognitive Testing

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Normal Aging does Not Impair Orbitofrontal-Dependent Reinforcer Devaluation Effects.

Teghpal Singh¹, Joshua L Jones, Michael A McDannald

¹Program in Neuroscience, University of Maryland School of Medicine Baltimore, MD, USA.

Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience

|April 13, 2011

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Normal aging does not impair the ability to use outcome expectancies to guide behavior, even though cognitive flexibility may decline. This suggests distinct neural mechanisms for these functions in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC).

Keywords:

aging associative learning devaluation orbitofrontal rat

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Aging
Behavioral Science

Background:

Normal aging often leads to cognitive flexibility deficits, particularly those reliant on the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC).
The OFC is also implicated in using outcome expectancies to guide behavior, a function potentially affected by aging.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether normal aging affects the ability to use outcome expectancies to guide Pavlovian behavioral responding.
To determine if deficits in cognitive flexibility are dissociable from other OFC-dependent functions in aged individuals.

Main Methods:

Utilized Pavlovian reinforcer devaluation in young and aged rats.
Trained rats to associate a conditioned stimulus (CS+) with a sucrose pellet.
Induced a conditioned taste aversion via LiCl injections in half of the rats post-training.
Assessed conditioned responding to the CS+ during an extinction probe test.

Main Results:

Aged rats showed lower overall responding but both age groups successfully learned the CS+ association.
Both young and aged rats developed a conditioned taste aversion after reinforcer devaluation.
Both age groups spontaneously attenuated conditioned responding when the outcome value was reduced.

Conclusions:

Normal aging does not impair the ability to use expected outcome value to guide Pavlovian responding.
These findings indicate that cognitive flexibility deficits are dissociable from the OFC's role in using outcome expectancies.
Suggests distinct neural substrates within or related to the OFC underlie these different cognitive functions.