The decline of verbal and visuospatial working memory across the adult life span

Abstract

It has been well established that working memory abilities decrease with advancing age; however, the specific time point in the adult life span at which this deficit begins and the rate at which it advances are still controversial. There is no agreement on whether working memory declines equally for visuospatial and verbal information, and the literature disagrees on how task difficulty may influence this decay. We addressed these questions in a lifespan sample of 1,500 participants between 21 and 80 years old. The n-back task was used, with letters and circles presented at different positions around an imaginary circle, to evaluate working memory in the verbal and visuospatial domains, respectively. The participants' task was to judge whether the current stimulus matched a stimulus that was shown n trials prior. Both domains were evaluated in two levels of difficulty: 1-back and 2-back. The comparison across decades showed that discrimination in the visuospatial and 1-back tasks started to decline earlier in women than in men; however, discrimination was equal between the sexes in the verbal and 2-back tasks. Performance on tasks in the visuospatial domain exhibited more pronounced decline than in those in the verbal domain. The rate of decline in working memory accuracy was superior in 2-back tasks than in 1-back tasks, independent of the domain. These results revealed that the effects of aging on working memory are less dependent on the type of information and more reliant on the resources demanded by the task.

Working memory in older adults declines with age, but is modulated by sex and education

“…Third, the finding that education has a positive linear association with WM abilities is consistent with previous studies of younger and older adults that have examined this issue. As we saw in the Introduction, previous studies have reported positive main effects of education across younger and older adults (Brockmole & Logie, 2013;Cansino et al, 2013;van Gerven et al, 2007), with one study finding positive effects in older but not younger adults (Dorbath et al, 2013). Additionally, Fournet and colleagues (2012) reported that education was positively associated with WM performance in their sample of older adults (aged 55-85).…”

Spatial-Sequential Working Memory in Younger and Older Adults: Age Predicts Backward Recall Performance within Both Age Groups

“…There has been debate regarding the potential role of relatively active processing in age-related cognitive decline. Previous research has suggested that active tasks, which involve transforming, manipulating, or integrating information ( Cornoldi and Vecchi, 2003 ) are more sensitive to aging ( Vecchi and Cornoldi, 1999 ; Vecchi et al, 2005 ; Cansino et al, 2013 ). Indeed, in a meta-analysis, Bopp and Verhaeghen (2005) demonstrated progressively larger age-related deficits depending on the extent of active processing required in a task, from simple (forward) storage span, to backward span, and finally to processing intensive working memory tasks such as sentence span.…”

Carotid β-stiffness index is associated with slower processing speed but not working memory or white matter integrity in healthy middle-aged/older adults

“…Declines in processing speed occur earlier in the lifespan compared with other cognitive domains (10) and are thought to be a result of relatively widespread reductions in white matter microstructure (13,16). Additionally, nonverbal working memory performance declines sharply with age (4,53) and is sensitive to age-related changes in prefrontal and temporal microstructure and CRF in older adults (8,31).…”