The use of high-resolution fMRI to elucidate the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the benefits of environmental support on associative memory in younger and older adults

PROJECT SUMMARY By 2050, roughly 83.7 million individuals in the U.S. alone will be over the age of 65. Within this population, memory declines are at the forefront of age-related cognitive complaints. Associative memory, or the ability to link together multiple pieces of information, is especially vulnerable to aging. Associative memory is central to everyday memory function, supporting everything from our ability to remember face-name associations to links between medicines and their daily dosages. As such, there is an urgent need to identify methods that can improve associative memory in older adults. Our long-term goal is to identify effective, theory-driven, evidence- based approaches for enhancing associative memory in older adults. The objective of this application is to elucidate the mechanism underlying the cognitive and neural benefits of environmental support, in the form of schematic and perceptual grouping. Such support promotes unitization of information without requiring older adults to self-initiate cognitively demanding encoding strategies. This project integrates theories of perceptual and semantic processing with theories of unitization to advance our understanding of associative memory. Specifically, we will examine how schematic and perceptual processing induces unitization and how unitization can be strengthened with exposure-based repetition. Our overarching hypothesis is that grouping principles enhance associative memory by creating representations of item pairs that parallel how single items are processed in memory. This will be tested using high-resolution neuroimaging alongside univariate, multivariate and network connectivity analyses characterizing unitized, non-unitized, and item memory at encoding and retrieval in long-term memory. The approach is innovative because it directly applies well-established theories of information processing and perception to ameliorate the burden of binding in associative memory processing, with the goal of enhancing associative memory in aging. It is also amongst the first set of studies to apply high resolution fMRI and cutting-edge multivariate and network connectivity analyses to test the neurocognitive mechanism underlying memory processing in aging. The proposed research is significant because it tests multiple methods for enhancing associative memory in aging that can be employed across a range of applications absent of subject-generated strategy deployment. In doing so, the work is a critical step in elucidating the flexibility of neural processing across the lifespan to the betterment of memory function. By identifying ways to improve memory function in young and older adults, this work has the potential to 1) enhance other cognitive processes, 2) improve the quality of life in aging, and 3) help dissociate normal aging from early signs of dementia.