Structural neuroanatomy of semantic retrograde memory in older adults

Studies of brain lesions or volumes indicate that the integrity of medial and lateral temporal lobe structures is important for news event memory accuracy, but the relationship between cortical thickness and news event memory accuracy has not yet been investigated in older adults. In a mixed sample of 70 older adults with variable cognitive abilities but without dementia, we investigated the relationship between cortical volume, hippocampal volume, and cortical thickness with news event recognition memory accuracy across the entire adult lifespan using the Retrograde Memory News Events Test. Partial Least Squares analysis was used to identify brain regions where news event memory accuracy scores significantly correlated with cortical volume, hippocampal volume, and cortical thickness. We found that mean news event memory accuracy significantly correlated with volume/thickness for a network of regions that included the hippocampus, medial/lateral temporal lobe, medial/lateral parietal lobe, and specific areas within the medial/lateral prefrontal cortex. Poorer performance was associated with a thinner cortex (and smaller volumes). Almost all regions in this network exhibited decreasing brain-behavior correlations as the age of memory increased; thus, retrieval of remote memories was less reliant on the network. We also found regions in this network that were not identified by the Retrograde Memory News Events Test posttest (a measure of episodic anterograde memory for the Retrograde Memory News Events Test content) nor traditional neuropsychological tests. The regions identified as uniquely contributing to news event memory overlap with regions known to exhibit increasing Alzheimer's disease pathology and cortical thinning when pathology begins to spread outside of the medial temporal lobe. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).