Studies examining the effects of age on the neural correlates of recognition memory have yielded mixed results. In the present study, we employed a modified remember-know paradigm to compare the fMRI correlates of recollection and familiarity in samples of healthy young and older adults. After studying a series of words, participants underwent fMRI scanning during a test phase in which they responded “remember” to a test word if any qualitative information could be recollected about the study event. When recollection failed, participants signaled how confident they were that the test item had been studied. Young and older adults demonstrated statistically equivalent estimates of recollection and familiarity strength, while recognition memory accuracy was significantly lower in the older adults. Robust, age-invariant fMRI effects were evident in two sets of a priori defined brain regions consistently reported in prior studies to be sensitive to recollection and familiarity respectively. In addition, the magnitudes of ‘familiarity-attenuation effects’ in perirhinal cortex demonstrated age-invariant correlations with estimates of familiarity strength and memory accuracy, replicating prior findings. Together, the present findings add to the evidence that the neural correlates of recognition memory are largely stable across much of the healthy human adult lifespan.

研究年龄对识别记忆的神经相关性的影响的研究得出了不同的结果。在本研究中，我们采用了一种改进的记忆-了解范式来比较健康年轻人和老年人样本中回忆和熟悉度的功能磁共振成像相关性。在研究了一系列单词后，参与者在测试阶段接受了功能磁共振成像扫描，如果可以回忆起有关研究事件的任何定性信息，他们会对测试单词做出“记住”的反应。当回忆失败时，参与者表示他们对测试项目已被研究过有多么有信心。年轻人和老年人对记忆和熟悉程度的估计在统计上相当，而老年人的识别记忆准确性明显较低。在先前的研究中一致报道的两组先验定义的大脑区域中，强大的、与年龄无关的功能磁共振成像效应是明显的，分别对回忆和熟悉程度敏感。此外，鼻周皮层“熟悉度衰减效应”的大小证明了与熟悉度强度和记忆准确性估计的年龄不变相关性，复制了先前的发现。总之，目前的研究结果进一步证明，识别记忆的神经相关性在健康成年人的大部分生命周期中基本上是稳定的。