Aging memories may not be ‘worse,’ just ‘different’

From The August 20, 2020 news release of the Washington University in St. Louis

Excerpts
“Memory is the first thing to go.”

Everyone has heard it, and decades of research studies seem to confirm it: While it may not always be the first sign of aging, some faculties, including memory, do get worse as people age.

It may not be that straightforward…..

….Much of the activity he was interested in is in an area of the brain referred to as the posterior medial network — which includes regions in the midline and toward the backside of the brain. In addition to memory, these areas are heavily involved in representing context and situational awareness. Some of those areas showed decreased activity in the older adults.

“We do think the differences are memory-related,” Reagh said. At the boundaries, they saw differences in the levels of activity in the hippocampus that was related to memory in a different measurement — “story memory,” he called it.

“There might be a broad sense in which the hippocampus’s response to event boundaries predicts how well you are able to parse and remember stories and complex narratives,” no matter one’s age, Reagh said.

But for older adults, closer to the front of the brain, particularly the medial prefrontal cortex, things were looking up.

Activity in that area of the brain was ramped up in older adults. This area is implicated in broad, schematic knowledge — what it’s like to go to a grocery store as opposed to a particular grocery store.

“What might be happening is as older adults lose some responsiveness in posterior parts of the brain, they may be shifting away from the more detailed contextual information,” Reagh said. But as activity levels heighten in the anterior portions, “things might become more schematic. More ‘gist-like.’”

In practice, this might mean that a 20-year-old noting an event boundary in a movie might be more focused on the specifics — what specific room are the characters in? What is the exact content of the conversation? An older viewer might be paying more attention to the broader picture — What kind of room are the characters in? Have the characters transitioned from a formal dinner setting to a more relaxed, after-dinner location? Did a loud, tense conversation resolve into a friendly one?

“Older adults might be representing events in different ways, and transitions might be picked up differently than, say, a 20-year-old,” Reagh said.

“An interesting conclusion one could draw is maybe healthy older adults aren’t ‘missing the picture.’ It’s not that the info isn’t getting in, it’s just it’s getting in differently.”

[Repost] Tip-of-the-tongue moments may be benign

The 2011 Association for Psychological Science convention, which featured a Wikipedia booth with information about the APS Wikipedia Initiative and the Wikipedia Ambassador Program (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

From the 16 October 2013 EurekAlert

 

Despite the common fear that those annoying tip-of-the-tongue moments are signals of age-related memory decline, the two phenomena appear to be independent, according to findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Anecdotal evidence has suggested that tip-of-the-tongue experiences occur more frequently as people get older, but the relationship between these cognitive stumbles and actual memory problems remained unclear, according to psychological scientist and lead author Timothy Salthouse of the University of Virginia:

“We wondered whether these self-reports are valid and, if they are, do they truly indicate age-related failures of the type of memory used in the diagnosis of dementia?”

To find out, Salthouse and Arielle Mandell — an undergraduate researcher who was working on her senior thesis — were able to elicit tip-of-the-tongue moments in the laboratory by asking over 700 participants ranging in age from 18 to 99 to give the names of famous places, common nouns, or famous people based on brief descriptions or pictures.

Throughout the study, participants indicated which answers they knew, which they didn’t, and which made them have a tip-of-the-tongue experience.

Several descriptions were particularly likely to induce a tip-of-the-tongue moment, such as: “What is the name of the building where one can view images of celestial bodies on the inner surface of a dome?” and “What is the name of the large waterfall in Zambia that is one of the Seven Wonders of the World?” Of the pictures of the politicians and celebrities, Joe Lieberman and Ben Stiller were most likely to induce a tip-of-the-tongue moment.

Overall, older participants experienced more of these frustrating moments than did their younger counterparts, confirming previous self-report data. But, after the researchers accounted for various factors including participants’ general knowledge, they found no association between frequency of tip-of-the-tongue moments and participants’ performance on the types of memory tests often used in the detection of dementia.

“Even though increased age is associated with lower levels of episodic memory and with more frequent tip-of-the-tongue experiences…the two phenomena seem to be largely independent of one another,” write Salthouse and Mandell, indicating that these frustrating occurrences by themselves should not be considered a sign of impending dementia.

 

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For more information about this study, please contact: Timothy A. Salthouse at salthouse@virginia.edu.

This research was supported by the National Institute on Aging and a Harrison Undergraduate Research Award from the University of Virginia.

The article abstract can be found online: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/10/08/0956797613495881.abstract?patientinform-links=yes&legid=sppss;0956797613495881v1

The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article “Do Age-Related Increases in Tip-of-the-Tongue Experiences Signify Episodic Memory Impairments?” and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Anna Mikulak at 202-293-9300 or amikulak@psychologicalscience.org.

 

 

Related articles

 

• Brief Memory Test ‘Ages’ Older Adults (psychologicalscience.org)

 

[Reposting] A Major Cause of Age-Related Memory Loss Identified: Potentially Reversible

English: PET scan of a human brain with Alzheimer’s disease (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

From the 28 August 2013 article at Science Daily

 

A team of Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) researchers, led by Nobel laureate Eric R. Kandel, MD, has found that deficiency of a protein called RbAp48 in the hippocampus is a significant contributor to age-related memory loss and that this form of memory loss is reversible. The study, conducted in postmortem human brain cells and in mice, also offers the strongest causal evidence that age-related memory loss and Alzheimer’s disease are distinct conditions.

…….

“The fact that we were able to reverse age-related memory loss in mice is very encouraging,” said Dr. Kandel. “Of course, it’s possible that other changes in the DG contribute to this form of memory loss. But at the very least, it shows that this protein is a major factor, and it speaks to the fact that age-related memory loss is due to a functional change in neurons of some sort. Unlike with Alzheimer’s, there is no significant loss of neurons.”

Finally, the study data suggest that RbAp48 protein mediates its effects, at least in part, through the PKA-CREB1-CBP pathway, which the team had found in earlier studies to be important for age-related memory loss in the mouse. According to the researchers, RbAp48 and the PKA-CREB1-CBP pathway are valid targets for therapeutic intervention. Agents that enhance this pathway have already been shown to improve age-related hippocampal dysfunction in rodents.

“Whether these compounds will work in humans is not known,” said Dr. Small. “But the broader point is that to develop effective interventions, you first have to find the right target. Now we have a good target, and with the mouse we’ve developed, we have a way to screen therapies that might be effective, be they pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, or physical and cognitive exercises.”

“There’s been a lot of handwringing over the failures of drug trials based on findings from mouse models of Alzheimer’s,” Dr. Small said. “But this is different. Alzheimer’s does not occur naturally in the mouse. Here, we’ve caused age-related memory loss in the mouse, and we’ve shown it to be relevant to human aging.”

 

 

 

Read the entire article

 

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