Both younger and older adults prioritize reward-associated stimuli in memory, but there has been little research on possible age differences in the neural mechanisms mediating this effect. In the present study, we examine neural activation and functional connectivity in healthy younger and older adults to test the hypothesis that older adults would engage prefrontal regions to a greater extent in the service of reward-enhanced memory. While undergoing MRI, target stimuli were presented after high- or low-reward cues. The cues indicated the reward value for successfully recognizing the stimulus on a memory test 24 hours later. We replicated prior findings that both older and younger adults had better memory for high- compared to low-reward stimuli. Critically, in older but not younger adults, this enhanced subsequent memory for high-reward items was supported by greater connectivity between the caudate and bilateral inferior frontal gyrus. The findings add to the growing literature on motivation-cognition interactions in healthy aging and provide novel findings of the neural underpinnings of reward-motivated encoding.

中文翻译：

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额纹状体功能连接支持老年人的奖励增强记忆

年轻人和老年人都优先考虑记忆中与奖赏相关的刺激，但很少有研究介导这种影响的神经机制可能存在年龄差异。在本研究中，我们检查了健康的年轻人和老年人的神经激活和功能连接，以检验老年人会在更大程度上参与前额叶区域以提供奖励增强记忆的假设。在进行 MRI 时，在高奖励或低奖励线索后呈现目标刺激。这些线索表明了在 24 小时后的记忆测试中成功识别刺激的奖励值。我们重复了之前的研究结果，即老年人和年轻人对高奖励刺激的记忆力比低奖励刺激更好。至关重要的是，在老年人而不是年轻人中，尾状核和双侧额下回之间更大的连通性支持了对高回报项目的这种增强的后续记忆。这些发现增加了关于健康老龄化中动机-认知相互作用的越来越多的文献，并提供了奖励动机编码的神经基础的新发现。