A Specificity Principle of Memory: Evidence From Aging and Associative Memory

Greene, Nathaniel R.; Naveh–Benjamin, Moshe

doi:10.1177/0956797620901760

Cited by 72 publications

(162 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…As mentioned previously, the anterior temporal cortex is critical for perceptual recognition and visual object processing (Litman et al, 2009). Our findings are therefore consistent with recent evidence highlighting deficient fine-grained processing of sensory information in older adults and emphasize the importance of acute object discrimination for landmark-based navigation and episodic memory (Burke et al, 2018; Greene and Naveh-Benjamin, 2020). Taken together, the above results suggest that occipital and temporal regions involved in the representation of fine-grained information are particularly disrupted in older age.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Differential brain activity in visuo-perceptual regions during landmark-based navigation in young and healthy older adults

Ramanoël

Durteste

Bécu

et al. 2020

Preprint

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14Older adults exhibit prominent impairments in their capacity to navigate, reorient in 15 unfamiliar environments or update their path when faced with obstacles. This decline in 16 navigational capabilities has traditionally been ascribed to memory impairments and 17 dysexecutive function whereas the impact of visual aging has often been overlooked. The 18 ability to perceive visuo-spatial information such as salient landmarks is essential to navigate 19 in space efficiently. To date, the functional and neurobiological factors underpinning 20 landmark processing in aging remain insufficiently characterized. To address this issue, this 21 study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the brain activity 22 associated with landmark-based navigation in young and healthy older participants. Twenty-23 five young adults (µ=25.4 years, σ=4.7; 7F) and twenty-one older adults (µ=73.0 years, 24 σ=3.9; 10F) performed a virtual navigation task in the scanner in which they could only orient 25 using salient landmarks. The underlying whole-brain patterns of activity as well as the 26 functional roles of scene-selective regions, the parahippocampal place area (PPA), the 27 occipital place area (OPA), and the retrosplenial cortex (RSC) were analyzed. We found that 28 older adults' navigational abilities were diminished compared to young adults' and that the 29 two age groups relied on distinct navigational strategies to solve the task. Better performance 30 during landmark-based navigation was found to be associated with increased neural activity in 31 an extended neural network comprising several cortical and cerebellar regions. Direct 32 comparisons between age groups further revealed that young participants had enhanced 33 anterior temporal activity. In addition, young adults only were found to recruit occipital areas 34 corresponding to the cortical projection of the central visual field during landmark-based 35 navigation. The region-of-interest analysis revealed increased OPA activation in older adult 36 participants. There were no significant between-group differences in PPA and RSC 37 activations. These results hint at the possibility that aging diminishes fine-grained information 38 processing in occipital and temporal regions thus hindering the capacity to use landmarks 39 adequately for navigation. This work helps towards a better comprehension of the neural 40 dynamics subtending landmark-based navigation and it provides new insights on the impact 41 of age-related visuo-spatial processing changes on navigation capabilities. 42 65 place-based strategy involves the formation of mental map-like representations of the absolute 66 spatial position of the goal in relation to various stimuli within the environment. A response-67 based strategy refers to the process whereby an association between a specific stimulus and 68 the goal location is formed. The choice of a navigation strategy critically depends on the 69 visual information present in the environment (Foo et al., 2005; Ratli...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Differential brain activity in visuo-perceptual regions during landmark-based navigation in young and healthy older adults

Ramanoël

Durteste

Bécu

et al. 2020

Preprint

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“…Memory retrieval can range from a mere sense of familiarity, that is, when we fail to recover specifying details but experience the event as familiar, to the recollection of highly detailed memories accompanied by the retrieval of specifying information (Jacoby, 1998;Mandler, 1980; for review, see Yonelinas, 2002). With advancing age, the ability to retrieve episodic memories declines (Naveh-Benjamin et al, 2003;Nyberg et al, 2012) and older adults' memories seem to be less vivid and detailed (Folville et al, 2020;Greene & Naveh-Benjamin, 2020) than younger adults'. Higher levels of memory errors in older adults indicate the importance of retrieving memories with a high level of detail (Bowman et al, 2019;Fandakova et al, 2018;Koutstaal & Schacter, 1997).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Item recognition and lure discrimination in younger and older adults are supported by alpha/beta desynchronization

Karlsson

Wehrspaun

Sander

2020

Preprint

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Our episodic memories vary in their specificity, ranging from a mere sense of familiarity to detailed recollection of the initial experience. Recent work suggests that alpha/beta desynchronization promotes information flow through the cortex, tracking the richness in detail of recovered memory representations. At the same time, as we age, memories become less vivid and detailed, which may be reflected in age-related reductions in alpha/beta desynchronization during retrieval. To understand age differences in the specificity of episodic memories, we investigated differences in alpha/beta desynchronization between younger (18–26 years, n = 31) and older (65–76 years, n = 28) adults during item recognition and lure discrimination.Alpha/beta desynchronization increased linearly with the demand for memory specificity, i.e., the requirement to retrieve details for an accurate response, across retrieval situations (correct rejections < item recognition < lure discrimination). Stronger alpha/beta desynchronization was related to memory success, as indicated by reliable activation differences between correct and incorrect memory responses. In line with the assumption of a loss of mnemonic detail in older age, older adults had more difficulties than younger adults to discriminate lures from targets. Importantly, they also showed a reduced modulation of alpha/beta desynchronization across retrieval demands. Together, these results extend previous findings by demonstrating that alpha/beta desynchronization dissociates between item recognition and the retrieval of highly detailed memories as required in lure discrimination, and that age-related impairments in episodic retrieval are accompanied by attenuated modulations in the alpha/beta band. Thus, we provide novel findings suggesting that alpha/beta desynchronization tracks mnemonic specificity and that changes in these oscillatory mechanisms may underlie age-related declines in episodic memory.

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“…Rather than VISUAL INTERFERENCE CAN HELP AND HINDER MEMORY 5 conceptualizing memory as an all-or-nothing process whereby items are only ever remembered or forgotten, a more complete picture of performance may be provided by conceptualizing responses along a continuum of fine-and coarse-grained information. Behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging evidence reveals that memories not only vary along a continuum of representational detail (Bays, Catalao, & Husain, 2009;Berens, Richards, Horner, 2020;Greene & Naveh-Benjamin, 2020;Korkki, Richter, Jeyarathnarajah, & Simons, 2020;Ma, Husain, & Bays, 2014;Yonelinas, 2013;Zhang & Luck, 2008;, but that there are also distinct neural signatures tracking the amount and types of detail present in memory (Brunec, Moscovitch, & Barense, 2018;Cooper & Ritchey, 2019;Nilakantan, Bridge, VanHaerents, & Voss, 2018;Oh, Kim, & Kang, 2019;Rademaker et al, 2019;Richter, Cooper, Bays, & Simons, 2016;Stevenson et al, 2018;Wais et al, 2017;Wais, Montgomery, Stark, & Gazzaley, 2018). These issues were empirically examined using a continuous retrieval task ( Figure 1a; Wilken & Ma, 2004), whereby distractor similarity differentially impacted memory for the color of objects (Sun, Fidalgo, et al, 2017).…”

Section: Validated Circular Shape Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

Visual interference can help and hinder memory: Capturing representational detail using the Validated Circular Shape Space

Liang

Lee

et al. 2019

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Previous work suggests that the similarity of distracting information differentially alters how memories are forgotten. Though these effects have been shown for color memory, it is unclear if they extend to other modalities such as shape. In a first experiment, we created the Validated Circular Shape Space (VCS space), the first perceptually uniform "Shape Wheel" whereby subjective similarity was empirically quantified by angular distance on a 2D circle. In a second experiment, we utilized VCS space to examine the impact of distractor similarity on shape memory. A converging set of mixture model and model-free analyses revealed that distractor similarity differentially impacted memory detail. Dissimilar distractors disrupted both fine-and coarse-grained information, rendering the memory inaccessible. In contrast, similar distractors disrupted fine-grained but increased the reliance on coarse-grained information, rendering the memory blurred. As these effects were consistent across domains for both color and shape, we suggest these findings provide converging evidence for a set of general principles regarding how the nature of distracting information impacts memory. More generally, VCS space can be used to not only quantify subjective similarity but to also quantify memory fidelity for shape, a currently underexplored feature type in memory experiments.

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A Specificity Principle of Memory: Evidence From Aging and Associative Memory

Cited by 72 publications

References 37 publications

Differential brain activity in visuo-perceptual regions during landmark-based navigation in young and healthy older adults

Differential brain activity in visuo-perceptual regions during landmark-based navigation in young and healthy older adults

Item recognition and lure discrimination in younger and older adults are supported by alpha/beta desynchronization

Visual interference can help and hinder memory: Capturing representational detail using the Validated Circular Shape Space

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