ABSTRACT

Age-related declines in associative memory are ubiquitous, with decreases in behavioral discriminability largely arising from increases in false memories for recombined lures. Using representational similarity analyses to examine the neural basis of associative false memories in aging, the current study found that neural pattern similarity between Hits and FAs and Hits and CRs differed as a function of age in occipital ROIs, such that older adults exhibited a smaller difference between the two similarity metrics than did younger adults. Additionally, greater Hit-FA representational similarity correlated with increases in associative FAs across several ROIs. Results suggest that while neural representations underlying targets may not differ across ages, greater pattern similarity between the neural representation of targets and lures may reflect reduced distinctiveness of the information encoded in memory, such that old and new items are more difficult to discriminate, leading to more false alarms.

摘要

与年龄相关的联想记忆衰退无处不在，行为辨别能力的降低主要是由于对重组诱饵的错误记忆增加。使用代表性相似性分析来检查衰老过程中联想错误记忆的神经基础，当前的研究发现，命中和 FAs 以及命中和 CRs 之间的神经模式相似性作为枕叶 ROI 中年龄的函数而不同，因此老年人表现出较小的差异两个相似性指标之间的差异比年轻人更大。此外，更大的 Hit-FA 表征相似性与跨多个 ROI 的关联 FA 的增加相关。结果表明，虽然目标的神经表征在不同年龄段可能没有差异，