Schedule of Events | Symposia

Aging and the Effects of Prior Knowledge on Neural Representations of Scene Images

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 5:00 – 7:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Yuju Hong¹, Kana Kimura¹, Caitlin R. Bowman¹; ¹University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

In healthy aging, the detail and specificity of episodic memory declines, but general knowledge remains relatively intact. There is mixed evidence about whether older adults can leverage their robust knowledge base to minimize age deficits in episodic memory, and little is known about how prior knowledge affects neural representations during encoding and retrieval. The present study tested age differences in neural pattern classification and encoding-retrieval representational similarity based on whether participants were likely to have prior knowledge of the memoranda. Young (18-30 years old) and older adults (60-80 years old) underwent fMRI scanning while viewing scene images depicting famous and non-famous locations and while vividly recalling the images from memory. Later, they completed a recognition test to objectively measure memory. Behavioral results revealed that older adults’ recognition memory performance did not differ for famous versus non-famous scenes. Imaging data also showed little difference based on prior knowledge in either age group for decoding the scene category (natural vs. manmade). However, both age groups showed stronger encoding-retrieval similarity for non-famous than famous images in several visual regions (inferotemporal cortex, lateral occipital cortex, and posterior fusiform cortex), but not in medial temporal regions (hippocampus, parahippocampal cortex). Taken together, we do not find that older adults benefit from using prior knowledge when learning scene images, and that both young and older adults show signs of higher fidelity recall when they have less semantic knowledge about the locations.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic