Age-related alterations in functional connectivity patterns during working memory encoding of emotional items

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Gerontology

Background:

• Previous research suggests age-related changes in frontal-amygdala connectivity during emotional processing.
• Direct evidence linking age, brain activation/connectivity during emotional processing, and behavior is limited.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how aging affects the neural mechanisms of selective attention to emotional information during working memory (WM) encoding.
• To explore the behavioral implications of these age-related neural differences.

Main Methods:

• Participants completed an emotional working memory task involving attending to emotional targets and ignoring distractors.
• Functional connectivity analyses focused on the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and left amygdala.
• Behavioral data on accuracy and response times were collected.

Main Results:

• No behavioral age effect was found regarding emotional valence, despite lower overall accuracy in older adults.
• Younger adults used one network for encoding both positive and negative emotional targets, linked to higher accuracy.
• Older adults engaged distinct networks for positive and negative targets, and utilized the amygdala network for both, correlating with better memory and faster responses.

Conclusions:

• Aging alters the neural strategies for encoding emotional information in working memory.
• Older adults exhibit a more differentiated network engagement for emotional valence compared to younger adults.
• The amygdala's functional network plays a crucial role in emotional memory encoding in older adults.