Older adults and particularly those at risk for developing dementia typically show a decline in episodic memory performance, which has been associated with altered memory network activity detectable via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). To quantify the degree of these alterations, a score has been developed as a putative imaging biomarker for successful aging in memory for older adults (Functional Activity Deviations during Encoding, FADE; Düzel et al., Hippocampus, 2011; 21: 803–814). Here, we introduce and validate a more comprehensive version of the FADE score, termed FADE‐SAME (Similarity of Activations during Memory Encoding), which differs from the original FADE score by considering not only activations but also deactivations in fMRI contrasts of stimulus novelty and successful encoding, and by taking into account the variance of young adults' activations. We computed both scores for novelty and subsequent memory contrasts in a cohort of 217 healthy adults, including 106 young and 111 older participants, as well as a replication cohort of 117 young subjects. We further tested the stability and generalizability of both scores by controlling for different MR scanners and gender, as well as by using different data sets of young adults as reference samples. Both scores showed robust age‐group‐related differences for the subsequent memory contrast, and the FADE‐SAME score additionally exhibited age‐group‐related differences for the novelty contrast. Furthermore, both scores correlate with behavioral measures of cognitive aging, namely memory performance. Taken together, our results suggest that single‐value scores of memory‐related fMRI responses may constitute promising biomarkers for quantifying neurocognitive aging.

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Motivational salience plays an important role in shaping human behavior, but recent studies demonstrate that human performance is not uniformly improved by motivation. Instead, action has been shown to dominate valence in motivated tasks, and it is particularly difficult for humans to learn the inhibition of an action to obtain a reward, but the neural mechanism behind this behavioral specificity is yet unclear. In all mammals, including humans, the monoamine neurotransmitter dopamine is particularly important in the neural manifestation of appetitively motivated behavior, and the human dopamine system is subject to considerable genetic variability. The well-studied TaqIA restriction fragment length polymorphism (rs1800497) has previously been shown to affect striatal dopamine metabolism. In this study we investigated a potential effect of this genetic variation on motivated action/inhibition learning. Two independent cohorts consisting of 87 and 95 healthy participants, respectively, were tested using the previously described valenced go/no-go learning paradigm in which participants learned the reward-associated no-go condition significantly worse than all other conditions. This effect was modulated by the TaqIA polymorphism, with carriers of the A1 allele showing a diminished learning-related performance enhancement in the rewarded no-go condition compared to the A2 homozygotes. This result highlights a modulatory role for genetic variability of the dopaminergic system in individual learning differences of action-valence interaction.

Alterations of the brain extracellular matrix (ECM) can perturb the structure and function of brain networks like the hippocampus, a key region in human memory that is commonly affected in psychiatric disorders. Here, we investigated the potential effects of a genome-wide psychiatric risk variant in the NCAN gene encoding the ECM proteoglycan neurocan (rs1064395) on memory performance, hippocampal function and cortical morphology in young, healthy volunteers. We assessed verbal memory performance in two cohorts (N = 572, 302) and found reduced recall performance in risk allele (A) carriers across both cohorts. In 117 participants, we performed functional magnetic resonance imaging using a novelty-encoding task with visual scenes. Risk allele carriers showed higher false alarm rates during recognition, accompanied by inefficiently increased left hippocampal activation. To assess effects of rs1064395 on brain morphology, we performed voxel-based morphometry in 420 participants from four independent cohorts and found lower grey matter density in the This is an open access article under the terms of the Creat ive Commo ns Attri butio n-NonCo mmercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

Older adults and particularly those at risk for developing dementia typically show a decline in episodic memory performance, which has been associated with altered memory network activity detectable via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). To quantify the degree of these alterations, a score has been developed as a putative imaging biomarker for successful aging in memory for older adults (Functional Activity Deviations during Encoding, FADE; Düzel et al., 2011). Here, we introduce and validate a more comprehensive version of the FADE score, termed FADE-SAME (Similarity of Activations during Memory Encoding), which differs from the original FADE score by considering not only activations but also deactivations in fMRI contrasts of stimulus novelty and successful encoding, and by taking into account the variance of young adults’ activations. We computed both scores for novelty and subsequent memory contrasts in a cohort of 217 healthy adults, including 106 young and 111 older participants, as well as a replication cohort of 117 young subjects. We further tested the stability and generalizability of both scores by controlling for different MR scanners and gender, as well as by using different data sets of young adults as reference samples. Both scores showed robust age-group-related differences for the subsequent memory contrast, and the FADE-SAME score additionally exhibited age-group-related differences for the novelty contrast. Furthermore, both scores correlate with behavioral measures of cognitive aging, namely memory performance. Taken together, our results suggest that single-value scores of memory-related fMRI responses may constitute promising biomarkers for quantifying neurocognitive aging.