Age-related differences in spatial memory occur alongside reduced visual fMRI BOLD but preserved viewpoint-specific...

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Gerontology

Background:

• Aging is linked to reduced spatial memory and navigation abilities.
• Previous theories suggested age-related spatial deficits stem from difficulties with viewpoint-independent (allocentric) representations.
• This study investigates if perspective changes exacerbate age-related spatial memory decline.

Purpose of the Study:

• To test the hypothesis that age-related spatial memory decline is caused by difficulties in recognizing environments from rotated perspectives.
• To examine neural specificity of scene representations using fMRI repetition adaptation.
• To determine if age differences in spatial memory are due to selective allocentric processing deficits or more general scene processing issues.

Main Methods:

• Young and older adults encoded virtual scenes and later identified changes from same or rotated perspectives.
• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure brain activity (BOLD signal).
• fMRI repetition adaptation was employed to assess viewpoint specificity of neural representations.

Main Results:

• Older adults performed worse on scene recognition tasks, with no difference between same and rotated perspectives.
• fMRI analyses revealed reduced BOLD signal in older adults across both perspective conditions, not altered perspective coding.
• Lower trial-wise BOLD signal correlated with better performance, independent of age, suggesting independent age and cognitive variance.

Conclusions:

• Age-related spatial memory decline is not explained by a selective deficit in allocentric processing.
• Older adults exhibit general difficulties with scene processing across perspectives.
• Findings challenge the notion of a specific allocentric decline in aging, supporting broader age-related cognitive and neural changes in scene processing.