Age-related differences in the neural correlates of vivid remembering

When recollecting events, older adults typically report similar memory vividness levels as young adults, while they actually retrieve fewer episodic details. This suggests that young and older adults use episodic details differently to calibrate their vividness judgements. Capitalizing on the idea that remembering reactivates brain regions that initially processed details at encoding, the current fMRI study sought to examine these age-related changes in the basis of vivid recollection. At encoding, young and older adults saw pictures associated with labels and these labels were then used as retrieval cues for recalling the associated pictures and making memory vividness judgments. Results showed that highly vivid memories were associated with greater activity in the precuneus in young than older adults. Furthermore, the direct comparison between encoding and retrieval patterns of activity using Representational Similarity Analyses revealed stronger item-specific reactivation in the posterior cingulate/retrosplenial cortex in young than older adults. Taken together, these results provide new evidence that aging is associated with reduced reinstatement of activity in brain regions that processed the encoding of complex stimuli, but older individuals judge these impoverished memory representations as subjectively vivid.