Schedule of Events | Symposia

Executive control deficits and memory brain state engagement in healthy aging

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

Hannah Buras¹ (hb2mn@virginia.edu), Subin Han¹, Nicole Long¹; ¹University of Virginia

Healthy older adults exhibit both selective impairments in episodic memory, memory for events situated within a specific time and place, and deficits in executive function, reflected by difficulty switching between tasks and inhibiting task-irrelevant information. Based on our prior work, we hypothesize that episodic memory deficits in healthy aging may be due to older adults’ difficulty switching out of an automatically induced, task-irrelevant retrieval state when their top-down goal is to encode. Our aim in the present study is to determine the extent to which stimulus processing time impacts memory state engagement, with the expectation that longer, compared to shorter, stimulus durations will enable older adults to switch into a task-relevant encoding state. We collected scalp electroencephalography data while conducting a mnemonic state task in which we explicitly biased younger and older adult participants to engage either an encoding or retrieval state based on trial-varying instructions. Our preliminary behavioral data replicate our past findings that both age groups can selectively encode vs. retrieve in response to top-down instructions. However, we find significant dissociations in mnemonic brain state engagement across age when we account for stimulus duration. Specifically, at the shortest stimulus duration (1000 ms), we find that when directed to retrieve, younger adults show stronger engagement of the retrieval state compared to older adults. We had anticipated finding dissociations specific to encode, rather than retrieve, trials; this surprising finding suggests that older adults may have a domain-general difficulty in switching between memory brain states.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Episodic