Greater loss of object than spatial mnemonic discrimination in aged adults

Reagh, Zachariah M.; Ho, Huy D.; Leal, Stephanie L.; Noche, Jessica A.; Chun, Amanda P.; Murray, Elizabeth; Yassa, Michael A.

doi:10.1002/hipo.22562

Cited by 99 publications

(135 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…First, a majority of aged rats were impaired on spatial discriminations in which the distance between target and foil locations was ,88 cm. These data support an emerging consensus in the field of cognitive aging that age-associated discrimination deficits in humans and animal models are observed when the test stimuli are similar or share common features (Stark et al 2010(Stark et al , 2013Burke et al 2011;Yassa et al 2011a,b;Ryan et al 2012;Holden et al 2013;Reagh et al 2014Reagh et al , 2016. Moreover, the observation that a subset of aged rats were Figure 5.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

“…( * ) P , 0.05 ( * * ) P , 0.01. Discrimination and spatial memory in aging www.learnmem.org unimpaired in performing difficult spatial discriminations parallels recent data from aged humans, showing spatial discrimination abilities are less prone to decline with aging than visual object discrimination abilities (Reagh et al 2016). Future experiments will need to cross-characterize animals on object and spatial discrimination problems and directly measure the extent to which these modalities are differentially vulnerable in aged rats.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 55%

“…In support of this interpretation, discrimination abilities are impaired in healthy aged humans (Toner et al 2009;Stark et al 2010Stark et al , 2013Holden et al 2012Holden et al , 2013Ryan et al 2012;Reagh et al 2014Reagh et al , 2016, monkeys (Burke et al 2011), and rats (Burke et al 2010(Burke et al , 2011). An intriguing aspect of these deficits is that older adults who do not show episodic memory loss can be impaired relative to young adults at difficult discriminations between similar stimuli, but not easy discriminations between unique stimuli (Stark et al 2013;Reagh et al 2014Reagh et al , 2016. This observation suggests that age-related discrimination deficits could precede broader episodic memory decline.…”

mentioning

confidence: 85%

“…Both spatial memory and spatial discrimination require intact hippocampal function (Schenk and Morris 1985;Xavier et al 1999;Gilbert et al 1998Gilbert et al , 2001Gilbert and Kesner 2006;Morris et al 2012), and age-related differences in hippocampal-dependent memory function have recently been linked to differences in discrimination abilities in humans (Stark et al 2013;Reagh et al 2014Reagh et al , 2016, as well as in rats (LaSarge et al 2007). We therefore sought to determine whether spatial memory performance on the water maze task was correlated with spatial discrimination performance across our cohort of young and aged rats.…”

Section: Spatial Memory and Spatial Discrimination Abilities Are Not mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Discrimination performance in aging is vulnerable to interference and dissociable from spatial memory

et al. 2016

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Hippocampal-dependent episodic memory and stimulus discrimination abilities are both compromised in the elderly. The reduced capacity to discriminate between similar stimuli likely contributes to multiple aspects of age-related cognitive impairment; however, the association of these behaviors within individuals has never been examined in an animal model. In the present study, young and aged F344×BN F1 hybrid rats were cross-characterized on the Morris water maze test of spatial memory and a dentate gyrus-dependent match-to-position test of spatial discrimination ability. Aged rats showed overall impairments relative to young in spatial learning and memory on the water maze task. Although young and aged learned to apply a match-to-position response strategy in performing easy spatial discriminations within a similar number of trials, a majority of aged rats were impaired relative to young in performing difficult spatial discriminations on subsequent tests. Moreover, all aged rats were susceptible to cumulative interference during spatial discrimination tests, such that error rate increased on later trials of test sessions. These data suggest that when faced with difficult discriminations, the aged rats were less able to distinguish current goal locations from those of previous trials. Increasing acetylcholine levels with donepezil did not improve aged rats' abilities to accurately perform difficult spatial discriminations or reduce their susceptibility to interference. Interestingly, better spatial memory abilities were not significantly associated with higher performance on difficult spatial discriminations. This observation, along with the finding that aged rats made more errors under conditions in which interference was high, suggests that match-to-position spatial discrimination performance may rely on extra-hippocampal structures such as the prefrontal cortex, in addition to the dentate gyrus.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 55%

mentioning

confidence: 85%

Section: Spatial Memory and Spatial Discrimination Abilities Are Not mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Discrimination performance in aging is vulnerable to interference and dissociable from spatial memory

et al. 2016

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“…We then performed a median split, in which participants were divided based on their delayed recall performance on the RAVLT into AU (N ¼ 16, 11 female; mean age 75.7 + 3.9 SD, range ¼ 68-83, RAVLT score ≥12) and AI (N ¼ 16, 10 female; mean age 73.8 + 4.8 SD, range ¼ 63 -81, RAVLT score ≤11). This method of splitting groups into AU and AI has been used previously (Stark et al 2013;Reagh et al 2014Reagh et al , 2015 and is in line with studies that show no differences between AU and young norms, while the AI group differs significantly from the young (Gallagher et al 1993;Stark et al 2010). Importantly, the AI group did not present with memory complaints, nor did they present with memory deficits sufficient for a diagnosis of clinical impairment.…”

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confidence: 76%

Positivity effect specific to older adults with subclinical memory impairment

et al. 2016

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Numerous studies have suggested that older adults preferentially remember positive information ("positivity effect"), however others have reported mixed results. One potential source of conflict is that aging is not a unitary phenomenon and individual differences exist. We modified a standard neuropsychological test to vary emotional content and tested memory at three time points (immediate/20 min/1 wk). Cognitively normal older adults were stratified into those with and without subclinical memory impairment. We found that the positivity effect was limited to those with subclinical memory impairment, suggesting that consideration of subclinical memory impairment is necessary for understanding age-related emotional memory alterations.[Supplemental material is available for this article.]Increasing age is the greatest risk factor for developing mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) (Thies and Bleiler 2011). Thus, it is vital to understand neurocognitive changes that occur during the aging process to identify early phenotypes that may be associated with later cognitive decline. Memory impairment is one of the hallmark cognitive dysfunctions in healthy aging and is a major symptom of MCI and AD. There is extensive evidence that episodic memory, or memory for events, generally declines with age (Craik and Simon 1980;Glisky 2007). However, some studies suggest that there is a "positivity effect," where older adults may be more likely to attend to and remember positive information (Mather and Carstensen 2005;Wong et al. 2012). On the other hand, some studies have suggested that older adults are biased toward remembering negative details (Kensinger et al. 2007) or show no evidence of such an age-related positivity bias (Grühn et al. 2005;Fernandes et al. 2008). One potential source of conflict is that aging is not a uniform phenomenon and individual differences are frequently observed in older adults.There are numerous approaches to examining individual differences with age. One such approach dichotomizes older rats into two groups (Gallagher et al. 1993). One group of older rats performs on par with young rats on the Morris Water Maze (i.e., "aged-unimpaired"-AU), while another group performs outside of the range of young rat performance (i.e., "aged-impaired"-AI). This approach has been used to examine the aged brain in which this dichotomy maps onto neurobiological alterations associated with medial temporal lobe dysfunction, including synaptic loss in the perforant path (Smith et al. 2000), loss of inhibitory tone (Spiegel et al. 2013), hyperexcitability in the CA3 subregion of the hippocampus (Wilson et al. 2004(Wilson et al. , 2005, as well as loss of reelin and increased phosphorylated tau expression in the lateral entorhinal cortex (Stranahan et al. 2011). In humans, we have used a similar approach and have found that individual differences in age-related memory impairment (as defined by performance on the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test-RAVLT, a word-list learning task) was associated w...

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Early cognitive decline in older adults better predicts object than scene recognition performance

et al. 2016

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There is an ongoing debate regarding the nature of memory deficits that occur in the early stages of mild cognitive impairment (MCI). MCI has been associated with atrophy to regions that process objects, namely perirhinal and lateral entorhinal cortices. However, it is currently unclear whether older adults with early MCI will show memory deficits that are specific to objects, or whether they will also show memory deficits for other stimulus classes, such as scenes. We tested 75 older adults using an object and scene recognition task with stimulus-specific interference (i.e., exposure to irrelevant object or scene stimuli). We found an interaction (P = 0.05) whereby scores on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a neuropsychological test with high sensitivity to MCI, shared a stronger relationship with object recognition than with scene recognition performance. Interestingly, this relationship was not modulated by the stimulus category of interfering items. To further explore these findings, we also tested an amnesic patient (DA) with known medial temporal lobe damage. Like older adults with early signs of MCI, DA showed poorer object recognition than scene recognition performance. Additionally, his performance was not modulated by the stimulus category of interfering material. By demonstrating that object memory is more predictive of cognitive decline than scene memory, these findings support the notion of perirhinal and lateral entorhinal cortex dysfunction in the early stages of MCI. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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Greater loss of object than spatial mnemonic discrimination in aged adults

Cited by 99 publications

References 30 publications

Discrimination performance in aging is vulnerable to interference and dissociable from spatial memory

Discrimination performance in aging is vulnerable to interference and dissociable from spatial memory

Positivity effect specific to older adults with subclinical memory impairment

Early cognitive decline in older adults better predicts object than scene recognition performance

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