Emotion and self-referential information can both enhance memory, but whether they do so via common mechanisms across the adult lifespan remains underexplored. To address this gap, the current study directly compared, within the same fMRI paradigm, the encoding of emotionally salient and self-referential information in older adults and younger adults. Behavioral results replicated the typical patterns of better memory for emotional than neutral information and for self-referential than non-self-referential materials; these memory enhancements were present for younger and older adults. In neural activity, young and older adults showed similar modulation by emotion, but there were substantial age differences in the way self-referential processing affected neural recruitment. Contrary to our hypothesis, we found little evidence for overlap in the neural mechanisms engaged for emotional and self-referential processing. These results reveal that—just as in cognitive domains—older adults can show similar performance to younger adults in socioemotional domains even though the two age groups engage distinct neural mechanisms. These findings demonstrate the need for future research delving into the neural mechanisms supporting older adults’ memory benefits for socioemotional material.

中文翻译：

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支持老年人和年轻人的情绪和自我参照信息处理和编码的神经机制。

情绪和自我参照信息都可以增强记忆力，但它们是否通过整个成人生命周期的共同机制来增强记忆力仍未得到充分探索。为了解决这一差距，当前的研究在相同的 fMRI 范式内直接比较了老年人和年轻人的情绪显着和自我参照信息的编码。行为结果复制了对情绪信息比中性信息和自我参照材料比非自我参照材料更好的记忆的典型模式；这些记忆增强适用于年轻人和老年人。在神经活动中，年轻人和老年人表现出类似的情绪调制，但自我参照处理影响神经募集的方式存在显着的年龄差异。与我们的假设相反，我们几乎没有发现参与情绪和自我参照处理的神经机制重叠的证据。这些结果表明——就像在认知领域一样——即使两个年龄组采用不同的神经机制，老年人在社会情感领域也可以表现出与年轻人相似的表现。这些发现表明，未来需要深入研究支持老年人对社会情感材料的记忆益处的神经机制。