Age differences in self-referencing: Evidence for common and distinct encoding strategies.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Aging Research

Background:

• Medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) engagement is crucial for self-referencing information in both younger and older adults.
• Previous research suggests inconsistent MPFC involvement across age groups for self-referenced information encoding.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if making judgments about others alongside the self impacts neural findings in memory encoding.
• To determine if younger and older adults recruit common or distinct neural regions during a self-reference memory task.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to scan younger and older adults.
• Participants performed a self-reference task, encoding adjectives.
• Neural activity was compared between remembered and forgotten items.

Main Results:

• Both age groups robustly recruited the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) for remembered items, indicating shared neural mechanisms for self-referential encoding.
• Age-specific differences were observed in brain regions associated with emotional processing and cognitive control.
• These age differences were less pronounced compared to tasks involving judgments about others.

Conclusions:

• Making judgments about others uniquely influences self-referential processing in younger and older adults.
• Shared neural resources in the MPFC support memory encoding across the lifespan under specific self-referential conditions.
• Follow-up behavioral data support the interpretation that social-referential tasks modulate self-referential encoding differently based on age.